Hello, both root and home partition have suddenly become corrupt, and the repair tool from the installation disk just loops (Do you want to repair? Yes! Do you want to repair? Yes! Do you…).
This is block repeated several times with different numbers, and then eventually
57.264842] end_request: I/O errir, dev sda, sector 109614363
57.264922] JBD: Failed to read block at offset 1541
57.265053] EXT4-fs (sda5): error loading journal
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda5,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
$
The $ prompt is pretty useless, I cannot get to any sensible system.
I can still boot and run Windows Vista on /dev/sda3, but this is only a small 20GB partition that I do not use for anything. Is this of any use?
How do I read the S.M.A.R.T. values now? From Vista?
EDIT: I do have a comprehensive daily backup of my home partition, but I wonder how to determine whether it is worth trying to reinstall or whether the harddisk is just dead.
Those sorts of hardware messages are severe and point to hardware failure. It could also be the I/O channel, so if you have another machine try moving the disk to that. Alternatively put a known good disk on the channel and see if you can run with that. That’ll will tell you if the disk is a brick now.
TO know if it is the drive you need to run a low level scan. I use Spinrite but it is not a free program. You can normally get a scan app from your drive manufacturer’s site.
You can try to repair the file system with fsck program. Note this only works on unmounted drives so needs to be done from a DVD/CD boot. The repair function on the install will only repair small problems. If you need to manually repair chances are good you have lost some files even if you manage to repair. Read up on fsck ie man fsck before you try to use it. If there is damage on root just figure on a new install. Any piece of files and directories found during the fix will be found in lost&found.
You could run smartctl off a Live CD. I suspect if you do a search you will find some kind of SMART utility for Windows, since it’s implemented in the disk firmware and the program just sends the commands to the disk.
It also appears weird to me that the Windows partition is working fine, but that only the EXT4 partitions are affected?
Not strange at all. It could also just as easily been the Windows partition that lost crucial blocks. It looks like certain areas of the disk are bad, making it more likely it’s the disk and not the channel.
I just reinstalled 11.2 with no problems, without changing anything.
It mounted my home partition without any hickup, a feat that the repair option from the same 11.2 DVD did not accomplish. All data seems intact too, no difference to my backup.
The SMART extended offline test just completed. No problems. Good Health.
I am puzzled about what happened that caused the above. Could it be because I used WRITEBACK journalling instead of ORDERED?
does not really seem to trigger an extensive test for EXT4. And
sudo smartctl -test long
also finished without anything.
Sure, but I would exepect that those could be repaired by fsck.
Apparently, the Suse reinstall could mount the home partition without troubles, and smartctl shows no defect sectors either, which I would expect after a bump (which wasnt):
So apparently the HDD overheated, which might have happend with the laptop not shutting down properly while being in its bag. So is there no permanent damage, then?
The only way to tell is to do a low level scan of the disk to check for damaged sectors.
The only way to thoroughly check the file system is to run fsck on the partition and the partition must not be mounted so you must do it from a bootable CD try gparted
…then reboot. The ‘shutdown -rF now’-command should work too, but I suppose this is one of the many cases where ‘sudo’ is not working - let me take the opportunity to point out that ‘sudo’ is often not adequate to “switch to root”, its intention is way different from ‘su’ and also needs proper configuration of /etc/sudoers to work as intended. SuSE != Ubuntu.
Well, it does have an effect, I can see that fsck is executed. However for EXT4 the check only takes a few seconds instead of half an hour as with EXT3. So how thorough can this check be?
Thanks, I will try that and see whether fsck can be convinced to do something more laborious then.
However, I thought that during boot fsck is called before mounting the partition already? (Provided it is not the root partition.)
I know. I usually open a root konsole and very rarely use sudo.
Ever since I got a lecture by oldcpu in this forum that being root is a bad no no, I just write “sudo” instead of “as root” or similar when I post here.
(I think oldcpu thought I was logged in as root when I copy & pasted something from a root konsole.)
Well, it does have an effect, I can see that fsck is executed. However for EXT4 the check only takes a few seconds instead of half an hour as with EXT3. So how thorough can this check be?
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. One of the advantages of ext4 is that checks are performed at much better speed - and yet be reliable.
Yes, I understand that. This is certainly ok under normal conditions, when there is a hard shutdown, etc.
However, I fear that the overheating of the disk might have damaged some parts my data that were not used at that moment, so the journal would not know about those errors,. Hence I would like the CRC of all data to be checked.
Hm, so I did
e2fsck -c -c -D -f -p -v
on both (unmounted) partitions (took more than 6 hours) and
smartctl -t long /dev/sda.
Neither reported any errors nor bad blocks.
So I guess it is safe to continue using my harddisk then, despite this glitch, or is there another check I can perform?
