after inital install: hard drive failure? [solved]

[rimian]

hello,

I got gentoo intsalled yesterday with a few issues but it booted up ok. Now i cannot start the machine because:

The "tar" command failed with error:
Comressed file ends unexpectedly;
bzip2: Input/output error
Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)

then:
/dev/console: no such file or directory

and while booting:
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 2845508 [also same for 2845540 and 2845548]

this looks even to me like a hard drive failure. but before i go buy a new drive how do i confirm this?

thanks in advance
Rim

[mbjr]

Hi there,

This can be caused by couple of things:

Wrong module in kernel for ide devices
Broken IDE Cable
Broken HDD power cable

Try booting from livecd and fsck all your drives affected. It seems that you lost some data.

To confirm this, the best you can do probably is to play around with your HDDs from livecd, and in the mean time check your /var/log/messages and dmesg info recently. If you get the same "ide failed" message that means it's really something hardware specific, else, double-check your kernel modules or give a try to genkernel.

Hope this helps,
_________________
mb

[rimian]

i think the wrong module is most likely. i remember there were two errors when i first got gentoo to boot. one mentioned that eth0 didn't exist and the other might have said something about ide. it was late in the evening and i was too tired to worry about it at that point in time.

i'll try what you suggest. a hardware failure would be an interesting coincidence. but these things happen i guess.

thanks for the help!

[nixnut]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Kernel & Hardware.
Gentoo installed. Kernel or hardware problem, so moved here.
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[rimian]

yes it seems i had a hard drive failure. what a bummer!