Corrupted reiserfs - cannot fsck [SOLVED - hardware problem]

Given M. Sur · Last edited by Given M. Sur on Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:55 am; edited 1 time in total

I'm having some serious problems with a reiserfs partition. You can skip to "Current Problem" or continue reading this section to learn how it started: I tried to untar a file, and I got some errors saying I was out of disk space. I don't think that was right, but now I have to way to confirm it. So, I decided to just delete the files I had uncompressed, I got a "permission denied" error. So, I switched to root and tried again, and got a seg fault. So, being the dumbass that I am, I thought... hmmm... a seg fault, let's try that again and see if it happens again.

So, I tried again to delete the files, and rm froze -- it also seemed to have frozen the root user. Everything under my X session for my regular user was still working, but I could not su to root from any of my terminals, it would just freeze after typing the root password (although I could Ctrl-C it to stop the login attempt). After waiting a while to see if the problem would fix itself I finally decided to reboot my system. Trying to exit X in the normal way failed, so I had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I then logged in as root without a problem and typed reboot. I got the "system is shutting down" message (or whatever it says at the beginning of a reboot), and then the system froze.

So, I waited a while, hoping it was just taking a while, but I ended up having to do a hard reset.

Current Problem
I cannot mount my /home directory now. I get an error that says fsck couldn't fix it, and that I need to fix it manually.

So, I try to reiserfsck /dev/hdb1 and I get the following error:

Moloch · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:04 pm Post subject:

No more ideas at the moment, but let's get a little more information. In particular to check for possible hardware failure. Check the output of 'dmesg'. Paste any error messages or anything that sounds bad.
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:13 pm Post subject:

Well, most of the output looks bad.

Moloch · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:23 pm Post subject:

Yup bad news. Same thing happened to me. Here's what you can try. Chances are... consider your data lost.

First get a replacement hard drive with the warranty. Western Digital has a warranty program where they will send you the new HDD and let you keep the old one for 30 days. Then download and burn this bootable linux CD. Use the program 'ddrescue' to copy the contents of the bad HDD to the replacement HDD. The idea is you will be able to run fsck tools and attempt to recover data from a good HDD. A note of warning with this. This process takes a very long time. I had to do it on a 250GB HDD and it was running for over 2 weeks. If you have a spare lesser computer, you may want to consider putting these drives in that. So your main computer won't be occupied for that long. Still after doing all this. I was only able to recover a few GBs.

Sorry for the bad news. Sounds like you just got a dud. It happens. Good luck.

EDIT: BTW, I did some serious googling on this. There is very little information out there dealing with recovering from a HDD failure. Most of the information is.... "You didn't back up your data? Well you are fucked." Which sadly is mostly true. I had posted in the Gentoo forums as well. You will find that you will get few responses with these sorts of problems. This is just rare, shitty, bad luck.
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Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth. --Kosh
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:41 pm Post subject:

Well, thanks for the info.

Looks like I won't be buying Maxtor drives anymore. I noticed several other complaints about them when I was searching before creating this thread.

And I unfortunately can't afford a new hard drive right now. But, at least I can use the free space on hda as my /home for now and just consider my data gone until I can afford a new drive.

Really sucks too, as my entire music collection is on there, some of which I still have the CDs for, but most of which I don't. Unfortunately, when you're broke and hungry $1 per CD from the pawn shop sounds like a good idea when the music is on your HD anyways.

The rest of the data sucks to have lost too, but it's not nearly as important to me as my music was.

The really fcked up thing is I just bought this hard drive a few months ago because my previous hard drive failed (although that one made loud clicks for the entire year that I used it -- so I never kept anything important on that one -- just system files). Who would've thought that the stock emachines HD would outlast two others.
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Moloch · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:58 pm Post subject:

Well I don't think this is an issue of Maxtor. I've got an older Maxtor about 4 years old. 27GB. Still fine. When my 250GB Western Digital failed is was just like this. Only after a few months. Plain and simple you are a victim of a dud. I don't care what brand is behind it duds happen in the manufacturing process.

However, if the HDD is only a few months old. Then you don't have to buy a new one. Use the warranty. They have an 'advance' RMA plan. Which is what I described with mine where they will ship you the replacement first.
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Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth. --Kosh
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 12:53 am Post subject:

I'll definately do that. But, they make you run a diagnostic program on the drive first. And, I don't have a floppy disk to put it on (and I'm not even sure my floppy drive works in vmware -- never tried it -- never even tried using my floppy drive with Gentoo at all now that I think about it). So, I'll have to wait until tomorrow, and get a floppy from my mom (and the program -- since she runs windows).

I may try the drive again later tonight too. It is currently very hot, so maybe after it cools down I'll get lucky and be able to use it long enough to at least get some of my music back. I'm certainly not counting on that happening, but I'll give it a shot anyways.

Thanks again for all the info.
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