Hello,
Apologies for the long message; I'm trying to give as much information as
possible.
After a few crashes with my "official 2.1r2" machine that I put down to
hardware (inadequate cooling possibly), it seemed to be fairly stable -
until I rebooted into NT. It got to the startup blue screen with the dots
going across and then the hard drive started whirring sporadically but
repetitively (if that makes sense). When I restarted, it did the same
whirring when trying to access the disk for the first time (after the POST
and stuff).
My active partition is hda1 which is NT's C: drive, and I use NTLoader to
get to Linux on hda2.
After a few whirrs "1FA:" appears, and by pressing A (changes to "1234F:")
followed by 2 I can go directly into Linux (through LILO). This suggests
that the disk isn't _completely_ dead, even if it is very ill. However,
after the partition check ("hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8
>") the whirring starts again, and is shortly followed by many error
messages. I'm copying by hand so I hope they're accurate:
----
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=722927, sector=2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02, sector 2
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=722927, sector=2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02, sector 2
MINIX-fs: unable to read superblock
[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12,FAT 0,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022,bmap]
[me=0x1c,cs=0,#f=36,fs=65526,fl=14268,ds=54886,de=0,data=54886,se=59648,ts=8
0622
4184,ls=5120,rc=0,fc=4294967295]
Transaction block size = 512
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=722989, sector=64
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02, sector 64
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev 03:02 iso_blknum 16 block 32
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:02
----
If I boot using tomsrtbt I can use fdisk to view the partition table (which
seems to be correct), and I also managed to delete the swap partition (hda3)
and replace it with a new (ext2) one. I could mke2fs it, mount it and copy
files to it.
Within tomsrtbt I cannot e2fsck any of the existing partitions (although the
new hda3 is fine) - very similar errors to the above are reported (this for
'e2fsck /dev/hda2'):
----
hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekCopmlete DataRequest Error }
hda: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=722927, sector=2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02, sector 2
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in showrt read while
tryin
g to open /dev/hda2
Could this be a zero-length partition?
----
The drive is an IBM DeskStar 20.5GB, 7200RPM and was bought in January this
year.
The BIOS has the disk in LBA mode and thinks it's about 8GB in size.
The partition table is now the following (hda3 used to be Linux swap of
identical size):
----
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2495 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 45 361431 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M
/dev/hda2 46 64 152617+ 83 Linux native
/dev/hda3 65 80 128520 83 Linux native
/dev/hda4 81 1609 12281692+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 81 462 3068383+ 83 Linux native
/dev/hda6 463 717 2048256 83 Linux native
/dev/hda7 718 1099 3068383+ 83 Linux native
/dev/hda8 1100 1609 4096543+ 7 OS/2 HPFS
----
I'm hoping someone out there might recognise the problem or be able to
interpret the error messages.
Does anybody know specifically what could be wrong? Is the disk really dead
(should I send it back)?
Is there any chance of retrieving any data from the existing partitions?
There's nothing vitally important (I'd have made backups if there was
anything :-) ) but there are a few files it would be preferable not to lose.
I haven't tried reformatting the lot yet for this reason.
Thanks for any help,
Paul Stephenson
