Hello.
I have a Microspace PCX48 computer (1GB RAM, 1GHz Celeron373, 512K L2 Cache, 16GB flash disk). It is running Mandriva 2007 Free edition (not spring), and it has three partitions on it: (/boot, /, and swap). It seemed to be working well enough until a few days ago, when it froze. When I rebooted it, it hung during boot, so I booted in the recovery mode of Mandriva. It went through the following commands and froze:
Code:
...
Creating root device
Trying to resume from /dev/hda5
Mounting root fs /dev/root
EXT3-fs corrupt root inode, run e2fsck
mount: error 22 mounting ext3
Switching to new root
Error opening /dev/console!!!!:2
Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
So I booted the system using RIP (Recovery Is Possible), and I had no problems mounting the /boot partition; however, when I tried to mount the / partition (/dev/hda6), I received this error:
Code:
# mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/hd
EXT3-fs: corrupt root inode, run e2fsck
So I ran e2fsck on the partition:
Code:
# e2fsck /dev/hda6
Root inode is not a directory. Clear <y>? y
*** glibc detected *** realloc(): invalid pointer 0x0809aa70
Aborted
#
I'm not sure what to do here. I would like to get access to the data on the drive, but more importantly, I want to know what caused the error in the first place. You see, this computer normally runs isolated and I have to administrate it remotely (I mean *really* remotely, as in on a mountain in the Andes), so I want to make sure this sort of problem doesn't happen again.
What can cause a root inode to fail? RAM, bad hard drive, software errors? I ran memtest86+ on the RAM for a couple of days and it came up negative. Perhaps it is a hardware problem with the 16GB flash drive? Is it normal to get errors with these things? Is there a way I can test it, or should I just format it and run fsck on it to look for bad blocks or some such? Ideas?
Is it even possible to get access to my data on / or is it lost forever?
Why would e2fsck fail when it detects glibc? This seems like it is a problem with RIP as opposed to the file system giving it problems, but I cannot see any reference to such an error with fsck in my googling.
Thanks for the help in advance!