[vox-tech] Hosed hard drive?

[Richard Crawford]

Running Kubuntu Dapper flight 6 on dual-core PIII.  The hard drive is 120 GB.  

This evening, while working on this computer, it started telling me that my 
filesystem was read-only.  I rebooted, and the system got as far as checking 
the root filesystem, whereupon it gives me the following error:

/: UNEXEPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
   (i.e., without -a or -p options)

When I execute fsck...

root at seamus:  fsck
fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to 
open /dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root

The superblock could not be read or does not contain a correct ext2 
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem 
(and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and 
you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

So I tried...

# e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda

and got the same message.  I also tried 16384 and 32768 (based on the 
information from man e2fsck -- I honestly don't know the blocksize on my 
filesystem).

dmesg shows nothing useful.  However, syslog has the following entries from 
just before the system crashed:
May 11 18:12:44 seamus kernel: [4478515.955000] ppdev: user-space parallel 
port driver
May 11 18:13:05 seamus kernel: [4478537.620000] hda: task_in_intr: status=0x49 
{ DriveReady DataRequest Error }
May 11 18:13:05 seamus kernel: [4478537.620000] hda: task_in_intr: error=0x04 
{ DriveStatusError }
May 11 18:13:08 seamus kernel: [4478537.620000] ide: failed opcode was: uknown


What's really annoying is that the computer has suddenly decided it will no 
longer boot from the CD-ROM drive, even though I have the BIOS set to boot 
from CD-ROM, then the hard drive.  Thus, I can't boot from the installation 
media to attempt a system rescue there.  I've tried booting using recovery 
mode from GRUB, but I only get the same issues.

Any thoughts?  This is a fairly old computer (five years old) so I guess all 
manner of horrors, including a failed motherboard, are possible.

-- 
Richard S. Crawford (http://www.mossroot.com)
"That which does not kill me makes me stranger."
    -Llewellyn, from Ozy & Millie
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://ns1.livepenguin.com/pipermail/vox-tech/attachments/20060511/4f715a5a/attachment.pgp