Re: [gentoo-user] is harddrive kaput?

[Steve Brenneis]

maxim wexler wrote:

>Hello everbody,
>
>I was surfing the web when firefox suddenly closed and
>attempts at re-opening it failed with strange errors
>since forgotten. I decided to bail out of X and
>restart it; that failed with an I/O error on /dev/hdb4
>where / resides. Couldn't do a shutdown; had to reset
>the box. Now I get a kernel panic - Cannot open root
>device "hdb4".
>
>Booted from install CD and ran dmesg:
>
>hdb: dma_intr: error 0x84 {DriveStatusError Bad CRC}
>     dma_intr: status 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete
>error}
>
>a bunch of these ending with
>
>ldm_validate_partition_table(): disk read failed.
>
>fdisk displays the partitions all right but attempts
>to mount /dev/hdb4 came up with, special device
>/dev/hdb4 does not exist.
>
>e2fsck: no such file, bad superblock
>tune2fs: couldn't find valid fs superblock
>
>Is my hard-drive toast? This is the same one you may
>recall I had so much trouble with a few months back.
>Will it be possible to fix? Or at least make readable?
>
>-mw
>
>
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
>http://mail.yahoo.com
>
>
The short answer is yes. You might be able to recover it by booting from 
a CD distro (gentoo minimal, Knoppix, Fedora Rescue, etc.) and forcing 
fsck to fix it. That might last long enough to get everything important 
off of it. Occasionally you can run badblocks (with the -w option, this 
will take a long time on large and/or slow disks) and find any bad 
sectors. Be sure to use the -o option so you can feed the result into 
mke2fs when you re-format. The -w option is destructive so make sure you 
recover what you need first. If you had trouble with it before, it is 
probably only hours from being a paperweight (if it isn't already).

Hope this helps.
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