[H-GEN] degrees of filesystem sickness?

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 4 Jun 1998, Allen wrote:

> - At boot time, VFS trying to mount the root filesystem readonly causes
> multiple kernel panics,
> - mount run from an emergency disk reports "can't find an ext2
> filesystem on dev 03:42", 

Zer0 and I have just been discussing this on irc, and we have come to the
conclusion that 03:42 is not a valid device.  Ie, it is a legal device
designation but it is meaningless to Linux.  It would be /dev/hda42 which
just doesn't exist.

We came to 2 possible causes: 1) The partition table is foobared.
Unlikely (but not impossible) considering that the dos partition is ok.

or 2) You are trying to reference /dev/hda42 which does not exist.  So
check for types in places like /etc/lilo.conf (after booting from floppy).
When mounting the FS, remember to explicitely state what partition is
should be.

> - e2fsck run with any option reports that the superblock is corrupted,
> try another... so I did ("-b 8193", as it suggested) and that block
> appeared to be also.

This wouldwork if the FS is there, unless it is totally foobared :)  And
remember there is a copy of the superblock very 8mb, so keep trying adding
8192 each time "-b 16385" etc.
 
> Is there anything else that could be done? It's not an absolute tragedy
> if I have to wipe clean and start again, just very distressing.

This is a real OS :) It is extremely rare to have to wipe a disk -
basically the dish would have to be physically foobared.  This isn't M$
"reinstallware" [Thanks for that excellent term Shakkaz]

> PD: pardon of my horror syntax english. you must be patient with me.

Prob as good as my spelling or typing ;)
Cheers,
	-Robert 

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at zen.humbug.org.au, robert at icc.net.au
				r.brockway at uq.edu.au
                         WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
Immediate Past President of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)


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