LinuxQuestions.org - HELP! I think my disk has died and Linux won't boot!

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HELP! I think my disk has died and Linux won't boot!

A rather flustered hello.

God bless Knoppix that I haven't resorted to trying to boot from the old Windoze partition that's still festering away there...

Here's the lowdown:

Last night, my system froze and two of the lights on my keyboard started flashing - it was Caps Lock and something else (can't remember which). The other computer on the network acted as if the afflicted box had dropped out of existance.

I thought: "Kernel crash - ah well, it's been up for the last 30 days, I'll just restart it."

No such luck.

It's SuSE Personal 9.1. It gets to the green loading screen, and freezes there.

I suspect this happens when it tries to mount /home, which has a whole HD all to itself.

I'm now in Knoppix, and although Knoppix sees /dev/hdb1, (the disk with /home on), it can't mount it. I have a lot of information on there that I'd rather not lose - I'm sure all is not lost, I just need to know what to do to get the disk back on its feet.

I'm new to Knoppix (although I've been on Linux since November) - can anybody advise me what sort of programs I need to use, and what I need to do in them?

Apologies for length...
Thanks in advance :)

You may want to try booting to your Win partition just to see if you can... Sounds like you might have dead/dying hard drive... If you can, you may want to try sticking a different hard drive on that cable just to rule out any MB/Cable problems too.

Good Luck.

Thanks, but I know my computer'll boot... Just not into my main Linux.

The dodgy disk is the slave on the cable with my main (40gb) boot disk as the master.

All I want is to be able to squeeze a couple more months out of it until I've saved up enough for my new setup, which'll feature a 200gb SATA:)

Is there any way of moving the partition table (which I assume is what has been affected) or just squeezing the data so it fits around the 'bad bits'?

I've got a 3.8.1 Knoppix right here, ready to fix it...

Try starting here:
"Busting Back Into a Locked Up Machine"
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux...ked_Up_Machine

That seems to assume the troubled partition is mountable - mine isn't.

I get this:

Code:

root@1[knoppix]# mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/home/

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,

      or too many mounted file systems

What I need is a program that will fix my disk and make it accessible, even just breifly - I have a DVD writer, so I can backup everything there for now if needs be.

Please don't give up on me:(

I wish I could suggest something from a Linux perspective, but I'm alot more familiar with Windows hard disk maintenance/repair tools like PartitionMagic than I am with the corresponding Linux tools. I believe the Knoppix CD has a tool called "qtparted" on it that is similar to Partition Magic - you may be able to run that and see if you can fix the problem that way...

Have a look at dd_rescue

Woo! Getting somewhere!

This seems to be an excellent program - it's safely extracting all of my data from /dev/hdb1 and dumping it into the newly creasted /dev/hda3 as home1.img.

However, I still need to know how to get useable files out of this raw mass of data...

Preferably something that's in Knoppix, but I may have made my main Linux bootable again by editing the bad disk out of its /etc/fstab, so I could try booting into that and compiling something a bit more substantial...

Hmm, maybe I did post that a little late in the evening...

Anybody about now who can answer?:)