[Cialug] Failing disk, spinrite partial recovery.

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Jan 29, 2008 10:02 AM, Josh More <morej at alliancetechnologies.net> wrote:

> First of all, back up /home to an external USB or something like it.  If
> there are disk/fs errors, the next step might make them worse.
>
> After that, use the smartctl commands to run a long test and view the
> results.  If the drive passes smart, you can probably re-use it.  If
> not, drill it and toss it.  It might be easier if you walk him through
> booting into rescue mode and opening up SSH so you can run the tests
> yourself.
>
>
Since the 7.10 cd is a live cd, you can have him boot off the cd and then
without doing anything else install openssh-server using synaptic or enable
remote desktop sharing.

I've seen flaky things like this happen and then go away, but most of the
time its a pre-cursor to total failure. If the computer supports SMART you
can run the reporting program to see what it says.

Follow Josh's advice and backup /home once you boot off the live cd.
Upgrading from 6.06 to 7.10 is an unsupported upgrade path, so even if you
do decide to use the existing hard drive who knows what will happen.



>
>
>
>
>
> -Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC
>  morej at alliancetechnologies.net
>  515-245-7701
>
>
>
> >>> "Kendall Bailey" <krbailey at gmail.com> 01/29/08 7:45 AM >>>
> I set my brother up with Ubuntu 6.06 a while back.  Suddenly the boot
> up sequence started to fail to mount the root partition.  He ran
> spinrite at multiple levels and while it initially flagged a few block
> unrecoverable, it now says everything is clean.  The boot sequence now
> gets past mounting but says it "failed to connect to the tty" or
> something like that.  He's in St. Louis so I can't see the screen.  It
> drops him into a root shell before mounting the /home partition.
> There's not much I can suggest for him to do.  Even things like dmesg
> don't run at this point.  I've mailed him an Ubuntu 7.10 disk since he
> lost the last one I gave him.  Any suggestions short of an OS
> reinstall?  Should he keep using this hdd, or does a failure of this
> type typically spell doom for the drive as a whole?  I'm hoping he'll
> get his /home partition safely backed up once we can boot off a CD...
>
> Thanks.
> Kendall
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-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode
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