I'm not sure what made this happen to my FC4 partition (hda6) after a yum install. My pc got all weird and wouldn't do another yum install or recognize my root password. Then I noticed that a bunch of processes were running (124 and I usually have 80). I didn't notice a single program that was taxing my cpu so I rebooted.

On reboot, my pc could not find grub. I booted with a Win98 boot disk and typed fdisk /mbr and that seemed to restore grub. Now when it boots, I get to grub and select FC3 (hda2). It starts up but notices an error on my FC4 partition (hda6) and tries to fix it but cannot and then drops me to a maintanence line where I type in a password. I typed in fsck /dev/hda6 and then let it repair my disk all night. When I came back, it was still repairing....so I hit CTRL-C to stop it and then typed shutdown -r now.

When it rebooted, I got the same thing. I'd like to be able to at least use my old FC3 partition which has most of the data.

This is the error I get after I select FC3 (hda2)

Buffer I/O error on /dev/hda6: logical block 0 through 12

Any ideas?

This could be a number of things. When getting this error, does 'dmesg' show any details?

Are you sure the cable on the drive is seated properly?

Why did you not let fsck continue? Did it seem to have found errors?

I was able to get into hda2 (FC3) by booting off a live cd, unmounting all drives and issuing fsck /dev/hda2. I had to fix all the errors manually (the -a option would not work). I was then able to boot into FC3 and tried fsck on hda6 and got this:

[root@LinuxHippy linuxhippy]# fsck /dev/hda6
fsck 1.36 (05-Feb-2005)
e2fsck 1.36 (05-Feb-2005)
fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hda6
Could this be a zero-length partition?


I rebooted a live cd and issued cfdisk /dev/hda to see the partition table and it was read correctly...hda6 is seen as a Linux partition. hda6 is where a new install of FC4 resides and has the default partition type (I'm not sure exactly what type-it just says Linux partition whereas hda2 says ext3 for FC3).

EDIT:

Here's the cfdisk /dev/hda output:

Name Flags Part Type FS Type Label Size (MB)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext3 /boot 104.77
hda2 Primary Linux ext3 / 9941.05
hda3 Primary Linux swap 536.74
hda5 Logical Linux ext3 /email 209.54
hda6 Logical Linux 9733.06

That looks like hda6 is completely missing a filesystem, which is decidedly not a good thing. Perhaps the superblock is corrupt and must be restored from the backup superblock?

now what-I have some Linux Rescue cds with partitioning programs?