Mandrake hda1 full! Urgent advice sought before wife explodes

alans · 06-14-2005, 09:22 AM

I have a Mandrake 10.1 box that has been fine.
hda1 was 6 gigs and is suddenly showing full. The client (my wife who is pregnant and more bad tempered than usual) tells me they had a power failure ( no ups...i know... i know) and now they are having trouble writing to their samba share on hda6. When users save from their XP stations to the samba share they get files that are duplicated, and zero bytes, and are not deleteable. It no longer boots into the GUI either.

Questions:
Are symptoms making sense with hda1 full ? Or is more damage expected?

Should i attempt a reinstall with Mandrake and try resizing partitions with GUI diskdrake?

Or buy anew hard drive and configure UPS sitting under desk in new shiny box (dont ask)?

Urgent need is the fastest resolution: what is going tobe the qwuickest route to fixing this?

Answers to my wife (you can hear her shouting about now) or here will do fine!!!

alans

exodist · 06-14-2005, 10:40 AM

fsck the drive, fsck.[filesystem] /dev/hda6 after you unmount it, fsck.[fs here] --help to get information on options specific to the Filesystem. If it finds problems it will try to fix them, if it does not find problems then somethingelse is borked.

exodist · 06-14-2005, 10:42 AM

Another note, if hda6 is the main boot drive and you cannot unmount it to run fsck on it you need to boot with a live cd or install cd that has fsck and run fsck from there.

alans · 06-14-2005, 10:59 AM

Thanks for the fast reply.
I just found out i can't unmount hda1 (boot) or hda6 so I guess a CD rescue mission is in order.

Do you know if running Mandrake install again is the correct approach or is there a rescue scenario on the CDs?

cheers

alans

exodist · 06-14-2005, 11:31 AM

you likely do not need to re-install
fsck is a lot like scandisk in windows. I am not familiar w/ distro cd's, so I do not know if mandrake install cd can boot into an environment you can use, but just about any live cd distro, or even if you wanted the gentoo minimal install cd, you can boot one of those, then once it boots rather than installing simply run fsck /dev/hda1, you might need to specify the FS so fsck.filesystem /dev/hda1

to actually repair any damage it finds you need to give it the appropreate --options, do fsck.filesystem --help to find them.