Ahh major disk problems with Reiser4

silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

In my PC I have 2 x 160GB hard disks, both running Reiser4 fs and yesterday one of them seems to have decided to die, taking with it all of my stuff! I have a backup of the entire system on an external 250GB disk from soemtime last week so I shouldn't have lost too much, thank god.

I think I'm going to take the oppurtunity to give another distro a shot, most likely Debian or maybe Ubuntu. The reason? I'm fed up with the long compile times and the constant upgrade, break cycle. Sadly I will miss the portage system, but after running Debian stable on a server I have fount apt-get to be just as simple to use. I did an "emerge -uD world" last week but didn't update the config files afterwards. Last night after emerging xfce4 to give it a shot I had to do an etc-update since the new xfce4 wasn't showing up in kdm when I logged in. I had 75 config files that needed to be updated, so I went through and for any files I had changed kept the original, for all the others I simply accepted the new config file. That seemed to work OK so I thought I'd reboot just to make sure the system was fine. Whilst booting up it had a problem accessing /dev/hdc1 the second hard disk, Reiser4 partition. Damn.

I've tried fscking the disk using the Reiser4 enabled LiveCD but it failed to rebuild the filesystem. The /dev/hdc1 partition doesn't even show up with an "fdisk /dev/hdc". At the moment I'm running a full disk scan using a bootable CD from Seagate (called SeaTools) and it has found a very long list of bad sectors on the disk :-(

Now could it simply be bad timing that the hard disk failed on me? The system has been up and running for a few months now without problem, but I have recently noticed that it didn't quite feel as responsive as in the past. I'm thinking that the 2 disks in a very confined space (Shuttle PC) means that they have been running too hot and caused themselves damage. Or maybe I should put it down to experience and not choose to run a brand new filesystem before it has had enough time to iron out any bugs. Is it OK to continue to use a disk with bad sectors, or should I stick it in the bin?
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 1:37 pm Post subject:

silentbob,

Bad sectors should be invisible to the filesystem. There are spare sectors and even whole tracks allocated when the drive is manufactured. These spares are mapped in 'on the fly', so the OS never sees a bad sector. The drive normally dies before they are all used.
If these are really bad sectors due to hardware, then the disc has died and Rieser4 was not involved. If the data has been trashed so that you get CRC errors, then the data is gone for good but the disk may be OK, so that if teh sector is rewritten properly, it will be good again. The filesystem may well have had a hand in such data trashing.
SeaTools may well be showing you all the bad sectors, including the ones that there present when the drive was new (but mapped out).
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

TheCoop · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 1:54 pm Post subject:

have you tried dd_rescue?
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silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

Putting aside the bad sectors (thanks for the explanation NeddySeagoon), is there any hope of rescuing the data? It seems very strange that the partition doesn't even appear when I fdisk. I have tried the following and they usually error, or cause a seg fault:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 2:43 pm Post subject:

silentbob,

Before you damage the data further, make a copy with dd (if you can).

silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 3:10 pm Post subject:

silentbob,

You won't get anything back until the partiion table gets fixed. Something has flattened your partition table. Fixing that may make all your data reappear unmolested.

Do you have a note of exactly how the disk was partitioned.?
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 3:33 pm Post subject:

silentbob,

You lucks in then. Its easy to repartion it the same way.
Before you do that though save whats there now with

silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

Cheers for the advice. I've removed the disk to prevent further damage so I'll need to reconnect it and give that a shot, fingers crossed :-)

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aminalshmu · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 7:16 pm Post subject:

this same exact thing happened to me after updating and rebooting about two weeks ago, or whenever the newest reiser4progs and libaal (1.0.3) were released. my disk's partition table was eaten for some reason, and now that i've finally got the two partitions straightened out it complains on boot:

Checking root filesystem:
fsck.reiser4: error while loading shared libraries: libreiser4-1.0.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory

Filesystem couldn't be fixed :o(

there's nothing WRONG with the filesystem, i can boot from the liveCD and fsck.reiser4 says it's fine. i tried re-emerging the older versions of libaal and reiser4progs but no luck. is this some sort of bootscript issue?

TheCoop · Posted: Sat Dec 25, 2004 4:14 pm Post subject:

its cos reiser4progs is linked against the old reiser4 libs. When you update reiser4 to 1.0.3, you've got to emerge it twice to get the linked libraries correct
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silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

I've re-partioned the disk, but I'm still experiencing difficulties with accessing the filesystem.

DaNIsH · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2004 6:47 am Post subject:

I've also hit problems with Reiser4 recentely, none partition table related though.
I seem to be getting alot of corruption occuring.
Maybe it's reiser4progs 1.0.3 ? I was using the reiser4-for-2.6.9-3.gz patch at the time the corruption was occuring as well, in case that sounds familiar.

Strangely enough the partition suffering the most is also at 90% usage..
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silentbob · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 159 Location: UK

I've abandoned all hope of retrieving the data from the disk and I have now gone for a clean Debian install instead of Gentoo. From first impressions it appears just as quick, possibly even a bit faster, and the install was much quicker. I might write up the experience and post it here to the Gentoo forums after I've got a bit more familiar with how the to distros compare.
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