Fedora 17 CRASHED.

mickeyboa · 07-02-2012, 05:00 PM

Fedora 17 Crashed big Time, I installed Fedora for a friend and Three days later it Crashed.

Ai Boot startup it would Stop at Rescue Grub. After further investigation I found that label for / and /home Partitions had neen changedf to "UNKNOWN" .

I'm very concern about the /home partition that has some very important data that needs to be retrieved .

I always setup my Fedora Boxes with a / /home swap , three partitions , that way I can do a next version of fedora fresh install on / and Users data will be left untouched by not Formatting the /home partition.

THE BIG QUESTION HERE IS, Can i do a fresh install by puting the labels back to / and /home from "UNKNOWN" and Save the Users Data in /home Or can I assume that the Users Data is LOST !!

My friend say the Data Has got to be SAVED. If I can't do it he will have to take the hard drive out to someone that can. I have talk him into using a /Backup hard drive on his new computer

Kustom42 · 07-02-2012, 05:04 PM

Well the file system label is contained in the superblock meta data. You can try to run a fsck on it to repair it but a good troubleshooting step would be to modify the grub boot option for the root partition to map directly to the /dev/ name.

If that works, which I think it probably will in this case, you will probably just need to do a reboot and force an fsck on restart.

---------- Post added 07-02-12 at 03:05 PM ----------

Additionally, you should have no problems using a knoppix or other distro live cd/usb to boot off of and mount the drives if you want to backup the data now before you do anything else.

mickeyboa · 07-02-2012, 05:19 PM

What I think I will do is do a Fresh install from Fedora Live-CD and put the label / back in and format the / partition and change the label /home back to the partition it was in and NOT Format the /home partition.

And hope the the User Data is still in /Home so I can save and backup it up.

I'm Thinking of a possible corrupted / partition.

Kustom42 · 07-02-2012, 05:23 PM

That's alot of work you are going to do for a possibly simple issue. I strongly suggest attempting to boot it to the device name through grub, /dev/sda1 more than likely, and then you can run fsck and it will fix your labels. This is a big reason why I don't use labels as I don't trust them.

mickeyboa · 07-02-2012, 05:29 PM

Could you explain in more depth how and where you would run /dev/sda1 through grub2 ?

John VV · 07-02-2012, 07:35 PM

Before you reinstall you might look into WHY

i ran into something like this a while back
with a dual boot of win7

win7 was on the second drive BUT set to boot first in the bios
EVERY new kernel on fedora would rewrite the menu.lis/ grub.conf with the WRONG drive numbers

so
was this fedora17 install a single boot or a dual boot ?
was it a ALL default install
/boot on the MBR and the rest of the drive(s) LVM
or
a custom partitioning and custom install

mickeyboa · 07-02-2012, 08:04 PM

Single Boot Fedora only.

I have been using Linux since RH-6 and never seen a crash like this.

Kustom42 · 07-03-2012, 11:11 AM

Try running the following from the grub rescue command line:

Code:

grub> root (hd0,1)
grub> kernel /vmlinuz(match this to your current boot line for your kernel path) root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=791
grub> boot

notice the "root=/dev/sda2" portion. This is the equivalent of "root=/ROOT" or whatever other label you may have given it only this is the actual device path that linux sees for the drive. This would be the second parition on the first hard drive so you may have to adjust the number or letter to match where your install went.