Hello Everyone,
It has been a frustrating 2 weeks and after reading lots about how to do it from some great boards, I am left with a question or two remaining. 2 weeks ago, my power supply blew, during close-down. My system is a SUSE Linux 10.1 and openSUSE 11.1 dual boot with WInXP (for those family things). After replacing the power supply my system had no root partition, or loader. It said something like “Invalid Partition table”. Grub had gone! So following swerdna’s “How to Boot into openSUSE” tutorial I used the openSuse 11.1 install CD rescue option to get to the command prompt, su’d, went to grub and followed the stated commands. So far so good.
However the new grub entry openSUSE (Failsafe) has a problem. It starts to boot in the usual way, but I note fatal Module errors in the boot log relating to sata_nv not found , ide_pci_generic not found etc, and Fatal error inserting edd (/lib/modules/2.6.27.39-0.2-default/kernel/driver/firmware/edd.ko): no such device but uses udev as boot source until
Waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/ataST3120827AS-4M60PX7V-part6… and then it exits to /bin/sh.
My fdisk looks
Dev Boot Start End Blocks Id Syst
/dev/sda1 1 1306 10490413 c w95 fat32
/dev/sda2 1307 2612 10690445 c w95 fat32
/dev/sda3 * 2613 14593 96237382 f w95 ext’d
/dev/sda5 5486 8096 20972862 83 linux
/dev/sda6 8097 10695 20987643 83 linux
/dev/sda7 10699 14593 31310653+ 83 linux
If there is anyone who can assist I would be greatly appreciative. This has been a big learning curve, frustrating but almost fun, and then I need to follow another tutorial for the dual boot thing.
Thanks John.
At least you got your partition table back (according to your fdisk output).
Don’t you have other boot entries besides ‘failsafe’. I guess it’s kind of normal that ‘failsafe’ doesn’t have all possible drivers.
cat you type : cat /boot/grub/menu.lst ? and maybe also cat /boot/grub/menu.* in case your boot menu were backed up somewhere.
Since the power supply failure caused enough disk corruption to mess up you partition tables. It is also possible that it caused damage to the file system(s)
Boot into the install disk and run repair option. At the tests screens just run the disk test functions. This will tell you if there is a problem and on which partitions. It also may fix minor problems. If you are lucky the corruption may only be on the root. If so the easiest solution is to reinstall (NOT formating the home partition!)
You may try fsck to fix problems but it generally leaves unassociated blocks in the lost & found and for programs files it is pretty useless. Read up on fsck before using
/dev/sda3 * 2613 14593 96237382 f w95 ext’d
/dev/sda5 5486 8096 20972862 83 linux
There could be a partition missing, starts at 2614 and ends at 5485 and about the same size of your fat32 partitions. If you think a partition should be there , try using ‘testdisk’.
Hi Folks
Thanks fro your replies. Prior to getting the system back to where it currently is, there were various Grub options for XEN & various openSUSE boots. Now there is only one. With the limited rescue boot system, there are a number of items not available. The mount for the sda5 device is not available, and from the terminal I am unable to locate menu.lst. (find .¦ grep menu) Grub does find it. I have considered the possibility the whole file system is kaput, but I have omitted the fact on one and only one time I have managed to boot into the 11.1 openSUSE linux, on Tuesday. It worked great, or so I had thought. I have an idea the device /dev/disk/by-id/ataST3120827AS-4M60PX7V-part6 entry is the problem. I don’t know where the entry is located, nor with the limited rescue system, what editor I would use to modify file once I have found it.
Thank you for your posts, and will give it another day or two before looking at other options.
Cheers JohnR. :\
