Subject: Debian 1.1: fsck failure.

From: Oz Dror <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 20:11:01 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,
I have an IDE and SCSI-2 Drives.

After a power failure. I cannot fsck one of my IDE partition
when I type:
fsck /dev/hda8

I get:
-- Parallelizing fsck version 1.02 (16-Jan-96)
e2fsck 1.02, 16-Jan-96 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
 while trying to open /dev/hda8
Could this be a zero-length partition?

Is there any way to salvage this partition?

Do I need to reformat this partition?

-Oz
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
NAME   Oz Dror, Santa Monica, California   
EMAIL  [email-masked]                     <<Linux  since 8/15/94>>
PHONE  Fax (310) 396-5798

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From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 10:15:04 -0400

Hi Oz --

> Do I need to reformat this partition?

It's risky to offer anyone advice on repairing their disk, but here goes:
Boot up your system in single user mode (at the boot prompt, 
type "linux single"). 

Run fsck manually on the sick drive (fsck /dev/hda8).
Now you can either say 'y' when prompted, or 'n'.  If you choose 'n',
you obviously have to find some other way to fix the problem.  If you 
choose 'y', fsck may change your file system in a way that leads to lost
files.  

Run fsck a second time; this way it can correct any errors that might
have been left dangling from the first run.

Then (this is on the advice of Sherwood Botsford) execute
reboot -n
He said:
'The -n is critical -- when you finish the fsck, the state of the
 disk and the state of the kernel image of the disk are NOT the same
 and the disk image is the right one. -n says, "Don't write out
 the kernel image of what the disk is..." '

HTH,
Susan Kleinmann

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From: Warwick HARVEY <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 12:00:18 +1000

> Do I need to reformat this partition?

This *sounds* like a problem I used to have (I don't remember the error
messages exactly, so I can't be sure).  My problem was that the end of my
partition table was being periodically corrupted, so that whenever I
rebooted, partitions 7 and 8 had screwed-up parameters.  Using fdisk to put
them back exactly the way they were fixed the problem.  What does fdisk say
about the partition?  If it has nonsense values, then you may be able to
salvage it the same way I did.  If the problem then repeats itself, then
there is a bug somewhere, and it wasn't just that I'd somehow managed to
screw up the partitioning of my disk (I *suspected* that writing data to one
of my partitions was somehow clobbering the partition table.  Ever since I
repartitioned, I have had no more problems, but that could just be because I
no longer have 4 logical partitions).

				Warwick

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warwick Harvey                                    email: [email-masked]
Department of Computer Science                        phone: +61-3-9287-9171
University of Melbourne                                 fax: +61-3-9348-1184
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052     web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick