[ILUG] Can an ILUG guru save me?

[Niall O Broin]

On 5 Mar 2005, at 15:05, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> On Friday 04 March 2005 22:41, Niall O Broin wrote:
>
>>> I thought there were lots of copies of the superblock,
>>> but how does one tell where they are?
>>
>> One does    mke2fs -n <OPTIONS> /dev/hda3
>
> Thanks very much. That did indeed work,

This is a bit much. While I'm pleased for Tim, it's rather galling that 
alternate superblocks have worked for just about everybody on the list 
at some time or other, except me :-(

> or at least the partition is now recognised as ext3. I'm presently 
> running "e2fsck -y" on this partition, and it has found approximately 
> infinity errors.

I know that story - but at least you'll end up with a filesystem which 
is consistent, even if it is full of garbage.

> I guess in the end I shall have to re-install ...

Sounds likely alright.

> I might have mentioned that Windows-2000 on /dev/hda1 also failed to 
> start, though in an incomprehensible way (a blue screen full of data I 
> did not understand).

It certainly sounds like something stomped all over hda.

> I know this sounds like a bad disk, but I have a feeling it is 
> something worse.

Well, it seems you had disk problems, which were either simply disk 
problems (they happen, a lot) or else were caused by problems with your 
computer's disk subsystem.

> I guess I'll have to try changing the disk,

Well, you might first try beating on the disk from Linux  (if it'll 
actually boot, or maybe you could use LNX-BBC or Knoppix or some such 
bootable CD) and do tail -f /var/log/messages and watch for disk 
errors.

> but I really hate taking the Picturebook to pieces. All the Sony 
> advice files show Japanese girls
> with long thin fingers undoing things I can't even reach ...

They weren't Sony advices - that was porn anime :-)



Niall