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ahubu
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Joined: 16 Aug 2003
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Location: Groningen, The Netherlands
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 Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:58 pm Post subject: fsck failure results in 'partition unknown'? |
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Hello all,
today I had a very weird and scary error I wish not to have again. I have a 200gb PATA hdd on slave (which is not running the OS). I have made one big partition on it for data, using the ext3 filesystem. The gentoo userguide states somewhere that you don't have to run fsck on your drives regularly, so I disabled that in /etc/fstab.
Today I decided it was time for a checkup (after half a year), so I let fsck run on all partitions. For some reason fsck hangs on the check of this partition (at least half an hour), so I decided to hardreset it. Now there is a warning saying someting like "hdb: unknown partition table", and the /dev/hdb1 entry doesn't show up anymore.
The weird (almost windowsy) part of it is: the next time I shutdown, leave it for a few seconds, and then turn the pc back on, it just finds it again. On a simple reboot, it stills does not find it.
I have been running Smartmontools all the time, not one single error in these 6 months.
Does anyone have a similar experience, and/or maybe know what causes this, because I'm quite scared now. All thoughts appreciated.
(off to backup this drive)
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Anne // Light travels faster than sound. That's why people appear bright until
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Blood Fluke
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Joined: 15 Sep 2005
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| Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 4:21 pm Post subject: |
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Perhaps you accidentally fsck'd /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hdb1, clobbering your partition table.
1. What happens if you attempt to mount /dev/hdb?
2. Back up the first block of the hdb device and see what happens when you put on a fresh partition table. As you just had one large partition, if you use the same tool, you should get an identical layout to the first time. What happens after you reboot and attempt to mount the new hdb1 with the clean partition table? |
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ahubu
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Joined: 16 Aug 2003
Posts: 400
Location: Groningen, The Netherlands
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| Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 11:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Blood Fluke wrote: | Perhaps you accidentally fsck'd /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hdb1, clobbering your partition table.
1. What happens if you attempt to mount /dev/hdb?
2. Back up the first block of the hdb device and see what happens when you put on a fresh partition table. As you just had one large partition, if you use the same tool, you should get an identical layout to the first time. What happens after you reboot and attempt to mount the new hdb1 with the clean partition table? |
Thanks for replying and sorry for my late reply. I could not have accidently fsck'ed /dev/hdb, I let the system do it(via fstab). The only problem is, that when I fsck the drive, fsck 'hangs' and when I hard-reset by switch (or soft reset by c-a-d), linux complains about an unknown fat table and /dev/hdb is not even created. Every concurrant reboot/hardreset the same. Except when I powerdown... it returns on the next powerup. Also notice that I have no problems whatsoever with the drive now, I just don't dare to fsck. It works fine, it seems to hang fsck though, maybe there is a partition-size limitation for fsck, or maybe the time to check a 200Gb partition which is 95% full takes half a day? I'm a bit too afraid for my data (the data is not important enough to backup (50 dvd-r... nah), and too important to me to risk losing it).
So actually the thing I want to know is whether it is possible that fsck-time is going up exponentially on big partitions/full drives (in my case 200Gb)?
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Anne // Light travels faster than sound. That's why people appear bright until
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Blood Fluke
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Joined: 15 Sep 2005
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| Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:45 pm Post subject: |
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| ahubu wrote: |
So actually the thing I want to know is whether it is possible that fsck-time is going up exponentially on big partitions/full drives (in my case 200Gb)? |
fsck takes a while, yes, but it shouldn't increase exponentially unless there's damage to the filesystem. Try fsck from a rescue disk, using ps / top / iostat to see whether it's actually hanging.
If your filesystem is hanging fsck, you should probably do a complete dump / restore  |
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ahubu
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Joined: 16 Aug 2003
Posts: 400
Location: Groningen, The Netherlands
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| Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Blood Fluke wrote: |
If your filesystem is hanging fsck, you should probably do a complete dump / restore |
hm, I don't like that sentence at all...  Well, I just might try the things you suggested a bit later, when the most important things have been backed up. Why should I use a rescue disk for fsck-ing and not just my normal system (since this is just the second drive in the system)?
Thanks for your help,
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Anne // Light travels faster than sound. That's why people appear bright until
you hear them speak. -Unknown |
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