[NBLUG/talk] More hard drive problems

Lincoln Peters lmpeters at mac.com
Sun Oct 2 20:02:13 PDT 2005


(If this message looks like it's been sent from a different e-mail  
address, that's because it is.  Read on and the reason should become  
clear.)

I've experienced another hard disk failure.  In summary:
* The hard drive contains several bad blocks.
* The partition table is gone.
* The computer won't start up except in a single-user shell recovery  
mode.
* The computer contains a project for one of my CS classes that's due  
tomorrow morning!

Fortunately:
* After my last hard drive failure, I set up software-based RAID, so  
as long as my other hard drives are OK, the CS project (and  
everything else) should be intact.
* I'm still running surface scans on the other hard disks, but I  
haven't found any problems yet.

What I need to know, then, is:

* Although my /home directory is on a software RAID-5 array, the  
failure of that one hard disk seems to have made it unmountable.   
Some kind of superblock error, according to fsck.  Assuming that the  
other devices are still OK, how is that possible?  (The array uses  
the ReiserFS filesystem.)



Lincoln Peters
lmpeters at mac.com





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