I’m running openSUSE 11.2 64-bit for the moment on my desktop. I’ve been having trouble getting 11.4 to download with good checksums. In an attempt to get that file, I downloaded the 64-bit DVD via aria2c overnight. I did it via sudo as the only partition large enough to hold it was /. This morning all looked good. I checked the SHA1 checksum and it looked good. I wanted to check the MD5 just to be safe. I downloaded the md5 checksum file from here and saved it in /home/<user>/Downloads/. The first couple of times I did this, I clicked on the link in Firefox and did “File | Save As…” Nothing happened. I didn’t get the dialog asking where to save it (I have it set to always ask where to save it). I then right clicked on the link and selected “Save link as…” That allowed me to save it. I switched to root in the terminal and mv’d the file to / so it would be in the same file as the iso. I then cd’d to root to run the md5 check and did a quick “ls -lia”. It gave me an error saying something like “/usr/bin ls not a valid file or directory.” (or something very similar to that) I tried opening the KDE file manager (forget what it’s called) but it didn’t open. As things were acting weird at that point, I figured some process was hung or something, so I’d reboot. I exited the root mode and the terminal, shutdown all apps and tried to shut down via the KDE menu. It started to shut down, but then went to console and came up with an error. I don’t remember what it was. It was long or I would have written it down. I tried accessing the console various ways, but only got that error. I had to do a hard reset. When it booted, I got the following:
doing fast boot
Creating device nodes with udev
Trying manual resume from /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160023AS_blah_blah-part9
Invoking userspace resume from /dev/disk/by-id/ata-<same as above>-part9
resume: libgcrypt version 1.4.4
Trying manual resume from /dev/disk/by-id/<same as above>-part9
Invoking in-kernel resume from /dev/disk/by-id/<same as above>part9
Waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/<same as above>-part7 to appear: ok
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16
[sbin/fsck.ext4 (1) -- /] fsck.ext4 -a /dev/sda7
/dev/sda7: clean, 8118/3474800 files, 1486910/13894209 blocks
fsck succeeded. Mounting root device read-write.
Mounting root /dev/disk/by-id/<same as above>-part7
mount -o rw,acl,user_xattr -t ext4 /dev/disk-by-id<same as above>-part7 /root
No init found. Try passing init= option to the kernel.
umount: /dev: device is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by isof(8) or fuser(1))
3.269491] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
I rebooted again with the install disk and ran the repair tools. The first time, I got messages saying that sda2, sda4, and sda7 were corrupt with the option to repair. When I clicked on “repair” it didn’t appear to do anything, but the message popped right back up. I hit the repair button several times on each drive (10 or so times), then hit “skip”. At the end, I got two errors saying no root partition was found.
I rebooted and ran it again. This time, it only gave me the corruption error on sda7 (root, of course). I again his “repair” several times, and again got the two “root not found” errors and rebooted to the recovery system. I then manually ran fsck on all partitions. They all seemed fine. sda7 took a while and it did say it was repairing. It succeeded. Reboot. Same error as above (in code block). If I try it in “failsafe” mode, same thing (not really a surprise).
I also tried running the partition manager from the repair utilities. It sees each of my partitions, but does not see the mount points. It will not let me specify the mount points unless I choose to format the drive. Obviously, I don’t want to do that.
So I’m pretty sure my root partition is corrupt. What are my options? Is there anything I can do to recover that partition? I was thinking about doing a re-install and just not formatting my /home and /usr partitions. However, since the install utility doesn’t recognize the partition mount points, I don’t think I can do that. Is there a way around that?
I don’t have a problem re-installing my entire system, but I don’t want to lose what’s in /home and /usr (each are separate partitions on the same disk). I’ve got data in /usr, and documents I don’t want to lose in /home.
Do you think it could be a hardware issue? I’m thinking about running Spinrite 6.0 on the disk, but that takes forever, so I can’t try anything else while that’s running.