Has my hard drive failed?
Machine is an old off-brand laptop running a 32 bit 1.6Gbit processor and 256M of RAM. The disk is partitioned for dual boot. The Windows partition boots just fine.
The Linux partition will not boot. Pressing the “escape” key shows that the booting progress stops at:
Waiting for the device /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8 to appear:
…
Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8. Want me to fall back to /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8? (Y/n)
Pressing Y or n does not resolve the problem.
Used the mini iso disk to run a firmware probe. It indicates 4 failures:
[FAIL] OS/2 memory hole test
F The memory map has a memory hole between 15Mb and 16Mb
[FAIL] EDD Boot disk hinting
D
F Boot device 0x00 does not support EDD
[FAIL] HPET configuration test
F Failed to locate HPET base
[FAIL] (experimental) APIC Edge/Level check
I think this means the Linux partition has a hard failure, and the drive needs to be replaced. Any help would be appreciated.
Parthenolide wrote:
> Has my hard drive failed?
> Machine is an old off-brand laptop running a 32 bit 1.6Gbit processor
> and 256M of RAM. The disk is partitioned for dual boot. The Windows
> partition boots just fine.
>
> The Linux partition will not boot. Pressing the “escape” key shows that
> the booting progress stops at:
> Waiting for the device /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8 to appear:
> …
> Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8. Want me to fall back to
> /dev/disk/by-id/ata-…-part8? (Y/n)
>
> Pressing Y or n does not resolve the problem.
>
> Used the mini iso disk to run a firmware probe. It indicates 4
> failures:
>
> [FAIL] OS/2 memory hole test
> F The memory map has a memory hole between 15Mb and 16Mb
> [FAIL] EDD Boot disk hinting
> D
> F Boot device 0x00 does not support EDD
> [FAIL] HPET configuration test
> F Failed to locate HPET base
> [FAIL] (experimental) APIC Edge/Level check
>
>
>
> I think this means the Linux partition has a hard failure, and the
> drive needs to be replaced. Any help would be appreciated.
This error usually means that the driver for the disk system is not
loaded in the initial ram disk (initrd), but it might also mean that
your OS is not really on partition 8. In my experience, disk failure
usually affects all partitions.
The first thing to do is to look at the partition table on the disk.
Does your mini iso have fdisk on it? Boot it and execute the command
‘fdisk -l’. It should list the partitions. If that disk doesn’t have
the command, come back and the group will suggest an easy download
that has the necessary command.
The mini doesn’t have “fdisk -l”. I will try this command from a live CD.
The results of fdisk -l:
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2c9de5ba
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2422 19454683+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 2423 4831 19350292+ f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda4 4232 4864 265072+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5 2423 3386 7743298+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 3387 3442 449788+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 3443 4095 5245191+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 4096 4831 5911888+ 83 Linux
The post didn’t preserve the white space. If you need, I can post this as a html table.
fdisk -s /dev/sda*
/dev/sda: 39070080
/dev/sd1: 19454683
/dev/sd2: 1
/dev/sd4: 265072
/dev/sd5: 7743298
/dev/sd6: 4497888
/dev/sd7: 5245191
/dev/sd8: 5911888
This is strange. fdisk -l shows /dev/sd2 with 19350292 blocks. fdisk -s shows /dev/sd2 having 1 block.
Parthenolide wrote:
> fdisk -s /dev/sda*
>
> /dev/sda: 39070080
> /dev/sd1: 19454683
> /dev/sd2: 1
> /dev/sd4: 265072
> /dev/sd5: 7743298
> /dev/sd6: 4497888
> /dev/sd7: 5245191
> /dev/sd8: 5911888
>
> -----
> This is strange. fdisk -l shows /dev/sd2 with 19350292 blocks. fdisk -s
> shows /dev/sd2 having 1 block.
Partition #2 is the extended partition that contains partitions 5 - 8.
Its size is the sum of those 4.
The partition table shows what is wrong.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2422 19454683+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 2423 4831 19350292+ f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda4 4232 4864 265072+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5 2423 3386 7743298+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 3387 3442 449788+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 3443 4095 5245191+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 4096 4831 5911888+ 83 Linux
Note that partition #4 overlays #8. I think that the disk data got
hosed when your system used that swap file and wrote all over the
Linux files…
I suggest you use fdisk from the Live CD to delete partition #4, then
reinstall the OS. I don’t know what you have on partitions 5 or 7, but
they should be OK, particularly if one of them contains /home.
How did this happen? Usually, the partitioning tools prevent this
situation.
Thanks for the suggestion lwfinger. I will try this tonight and post results.
As to how this happened. The laptop was loaded with KDE Live Four from a few months ago. The problem happened after I closed the lid without first powering down the laptop. I suspect that the suspend to ram/disk utility crashed the partition.
Again, thanks for your support of the SuSE user community.
I was able to get the laptop working again, however not with SuSE. I was able to retrieve all the data by installing Unbuntu. I will be starting a new thread in the OS section about Unbuntu vs. SuSE.