My Slack 9.1 box hung hard yesterday. The mouse was hung, I couldn't ping it... I powered off and on and during boot up I received a bunch of errors. After several reboots, i logged in at the prompt and ran fsck. There were several hard errors and i responded to copy the bad blocks.

When the box was finally accessible, during boot up this odd thing would happen - half-way through, instead of normal kernel messages, I started seeing what can only be described as code (it really look like C code) and after pages of that, the terminal emulation gets screwed up (all upper ascii codes - no alpha/numeric).

I switched to console 2 and was able to login. Some services were not started so I assumed the startup sequence was trashed.

I went about copying all the config files from /etc to my data drive (which appears healthy! and is mounted as /usr).

So - now the linux question. My assumption is that there was a minor head crash and several files including the kernel were trashed. How best to recover.

Do I even try to rebuild this drive? Is it worth replacing the kernel and trying a reboot? If so, are there linux tools to surface scan the drive??

Do you have any links to good linux recovery docs?

\\Greg

boot up in single user mode and do

badblocks -n /dev/MyHardDrive

Thats the non-writing test . . . if your system is as borked as it sounds then this will probably work.

It reported no bad blocks. But (and this is a big but), I accidentally started 'badblocks -w' which I now understand overwrites data. So now running fsck gives me an error"couldn't find ext2 superblock" and recommends using e2fsck -b 8193. This returns the same error.

I then tried dumpe2fs and get: "Bad magic number..." Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

So now I'm thinking the root drive is really dead.


\\Greg

actually it sounds like you have overwritten most of your harddrive . . . I guess if you can't fsck or dump then you need to just fdisk the whole drive clear and start over.

One more question on this. If badblocks returned 0, should I assume the hard drive is OK? Or just replace it?