Trying To Repair Damaged Hard Drive

kool_kid · 09-09-2008, 09:51 AM

Hi

I am having Samsung 40GB hard drive (IDE) with Centos 5.0 installed on it using LVMs. Everything was working fine from past 4-5 months.

I was running Squid on it. Suddenly my system got restarted and now I get Kernel panic error when booting. the exact error is something like this

Quote:

EXEC OF INIT ((NULL)) FAILED - BAD ADDRESS
KERNEL PANIC! - NOT SYNCING: ATTEMPTED TO KILL INIT

When I try to reboot in rescue mode and mount it, the rescue mode cannot recognize installed OS on it. Hence no mounting. When I do fdisk -l in rescue I cannot see any hard drives.

When I try to view the hard drive content from Winxp using the software "Explore2fs" I can only see the content of /boot I cannot access /VolGroup00 it gives "Read access" error.

With all these happening one thing is sure that my OS is gone. Is there any way to fix it (I don't see much hope though).

Why do you think this happened? Was it because of OS level corruption or Hardware issue. I'm unable to draw any conclusion on this.

TB0ne · 09-09-2008, 10:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kool_kid

Hi

I am having Samsung 40GB hard drive (IDE) with Centos 5.0 installed on it using LVMs. Everything was working fine from past 4-5 months.

I was running Squid on it. Suddenly my system got restarted and now I get Kernel panic error when booting. the exact error is something like this

When I try to reboot in rescue mode and mount it, the rescue mode cannot recognize installed OS on it. Hence no mounting. When I do fdisk -l in rescue I cannot see any hard drives.

When I try to view the hard drive content from Winxp using the software "Explore2fs" I can only see the content of /boot I cannot access /VolGroup00 it gives "Read access" error.

With all these happening one thing is sure that my OS is gone. Is there any way to fix it (I don't see much hope though).

Why do you think this happened? Was it because of OS level corruption or Hardware issue. I'm unable to draw any conclusion on this.

Not alot of details, so unsure what happened. The explore2fs util won't be of much help, since the /VolGroup00 is a logical volume group, which can't be just mounted/read as ext2/3.

Are there other members of the logical volume group? Other drives? If you had your file systems on one drive, and the volume group got corrupted (somehow), you lost the group and all its members. A fresh reload or restore from backup is the only option I know of.

kool_kid · 09-09-2008, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Not alot of details, so unsure what happened. The explore2fs util won't be of much help, since the /VolGroup00 is a logical volume group, which can't be just mounted/read as ext2/3.

Are there other members of the logical volume group? Other drives? If you had your file systems on one drive, and the volume group got corrupted (somehow), you lost the group and all its members. A fresh reload or restore from backup is the only option I know of.

It was on a single LVM Drive. How can we mount /VolGroup00 any utility ?

I'm not worried about the backup. I want to know the cause why this happened. Was it really OS problem that occurred or was it hardware problem. I'm curious about this.

amani · 09-09-2008, 11:26 AM

You can try using testdisk from the systemrescue live cd or the parted magic cd.