Topic: E-smith ver 4 error during boot up

[Rob]

Hi folks,

My e-smith server hangs during boot. It displays "unable to access block XXXX on hda" message and stops there.

Is there a way to fix this without losing data? If I re-install or upgrade, will I get a chance to migrate or restore my old server settings?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Nathan Fowler]

You have a failing drive.  Boot to "esmith single" when you receive a lilo prompt.

Type:
fsck.ext2 /dev/hda -p -c -y -f -v

Hopefully you have not sustained surface damage and fsck.ext2 will allow your system to boot so you can recover your data.  fsck is the "equlivent" of ScanDisk for Linux.

Hope this helped,
Nathan

[Rob]

Many thanks Nathan, but could not get to use the LILO prompt on the server. What I did do was to dig out the boot disk created during install and boof from that. However, I still get the same error. It comes up right after it says

"Freeing unused kernel memory 64k freed"  then the following errors come up.

"hda: read_intr: status = 0x59 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequestError}
"hda: read_intr: status = 0x40 {UncorrectableError} LBA sect = nnn Sector= nnn

and the systems hangs.

As you may have guessed by now, I am new to Linux, but It looks to me like the OS is reading some ivalid data from the hard drive and choking on it. Is there a way to force it to minimal boot? ( the equivalent of boot to DOS prompt in windows?) and then perhaps use fsck.ext2 to fix it?

Again any help will be greatly appreciated.

Rob

[Nathan Fowler]

It looks like the drive is bad at sector "nnn".  When booting up with the boot disk, do you get a lilo prompt?

If so, you can depress the left shift key at the lilo prompt to list the boot labels.  Type in "e-smith single" or "esmith single" depending on what is listed.  From single-user mode you may be able to fsck.ext2 the disk, if not there are some ready-made linux rescue boot disks (search google) that would allow you to not mount the drive (so you don't get the error) while still fsck.ext2'n it.

Hope this helped,
Nathan