Please tell me its not dead
 

Running Slackware 10.1, booting on a slave drive, with Grub bootloader on the master drive MBR. When i try to boot into slackware, it starts out fine, until it goes to mount the filesystem, and then all hell breaks loose.

I get 'bad superblock' errors. It tries to mount the root filesystem as ext2, then ext3, and just cycles through every filesystem type that is loaded (my system is on ext2) and fails every time, and then reports a 'kernel panic'.

I searched the forums here, but couldn't find any definitive answers anywhere.

Any explanations or ideas? I'll post a more detailed record of the errors if that would help.

Here is what i get when i try to run a fsck from Fedora Core 3 on the master hard drive:

[root@pcp010526pcs ~]# fsck /dev/hdb4
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
fsck.ext2: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdb4

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

[root@pcp010526pcs ~]# e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdb4
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdb4

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>


Running fdisk to check the partition table and it jsut says: "Unable to read /dev/hdb"

What does fdisk -l /dev/hdb say. Also is /dev/hdb the correct drive.

[root@pcp010526pcs ~]# fdisk /dev/hdb

Unable to read /dev/hdb
[root@pcp010526pcs ~]# fdisk -l /dev/hdb
[root@pcp010526pcs ~]#


It doesn't return anything.

yes /dev/hdb is the correct drive, this system has been running fine for months, until i replaced the IDE cable to the slave drive yesterday, tried booting into it today and had this problem.

is this the first boot with the new cable??gotta rule out the obvious first.

It has not worked on the new cable yet, if that's what you're asking.

But the bios detects the hard drive fine.

but nothing is accessible.

reading drive paramaters and getting data from it are different issues.if its not the cable,then you'll need to find a back-up superblock like fsck suggested (there's probably more than 1 backup).

*edit* you might try swapping the primary and secondary ide cables around to see if that fixes it or borks drive #1.if it does it's deffinately a cable issue.

I moved the drive over to the cable the cd drive was on, same problem still. And the cd drive has been just fine on that cable.

Partition Magic, running under windows, still sees the drive and all its partitions.

i don't know anything about superblocks or their backups, so i don't know how to do that (short of just trying numbers after the -b flag one by one).

google search .......and best of all.......it's written for slack :D .

You might want to do an integrity check on the hard drive. Use Seagates SeaTools, it is one of the best I have used and it works on any brand hard drive. You can download the iso image from here http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...EATOOLD_EN.ISO then burn it to a cd and boot your system off that cd. The rest is a easy to use GUI interface; you'll want to opt for the full scan rather than the quick scan as it is more thorough and accurate.

That didn't help at all. It jsut gave the same error message for every block number i tried, and i went all the way up to 57345.

I just need a way to recover the data, i don't care about the drive, its replaceable, but i need to get that data. Incidently I had been going to back up all that data on a seperate system when this happened.