Computer locked up entirely, now HD in error

General · 05-23-2006, 11:51 PM

My computer locked up and now I cannot boot into Fedora Core 5. I am writing this from another computer.

What happened? I just installed Xine with yum and attempted to play a VCD using,

Code:

$ xine vcd:/

This gave an error that a plugin for that was not available. I switched to Mozilla Firefox to find a solution this problem, when suddenly my entire GNOME desktop locked up. The mouse pointer could still be moved, but I couldn't click on anything, and the keyboard did not respond (I confirmed this by trying to switch on and off the numberlock light). After CTRL+ALT+BKSP, CTRL+ALT+DEL attempts, and 10 minutes wait, I hit restart button on computer. When it came back on, Grub couldn't load the distribution.

So I loaded the FC5 disk 1, and ran,

Code:

$ linux rescue

This found I/O errors on every partition of hdc (containing ext3 partitions /, /home, swap, /usr, /tmp, /var and an ext2 boot partition). Rescue printed many errors pertaining to problems with the disk, so I just did safe reboot and then told the rescue program to just skip the hard drive scan. Now I just have a shell to work with and I don't know how to mount the drive.

Code:

$ mount /mnt/hdc1
Cannot read /etc/fstab: no such file or directory.
$ mount /dev/hdc1
Cannot read /etc/fstab: no such file or directory.

What can I do to determine what caused this problem so that I can prevent any future occurence of the same nature?

Was it the reboot that caused the errors with the hard drive, or could whatever caused the screen to lockup have also caused these problems?
No irreplaceable files were located on hdc (I can always reinstall the distribution). However, important files were located on a second hard drive, hdb, in a single, 80 GB ext3 partition mounted as /mnt/hdb. How can I determine if the contents of my second hard drive were harmed in any way? I do not know if this drive was mounted at the time.

General · 05-24-2006, 12:00 AM

Perhaps I am doing more damage by trying to determine the cause of this problem. The only way I could get out of rescue was CTRL+ALT+Del. As soon as it was finished shutting down, I flipped the power off of my powerstrip to turn it off. When I booted back up to run the hard drive manufacturer's test disk, hdb started making very loud *tick* *tock* *tick* *tock* sounds. The very initial startup screen where it lists the primary, secondary, master, slave drives, just hung there. I shut down, unplugged this second harddrive. Boot can at least mount the rescue disk now and the ticking stopped.