Re: Serious problem with Linux on an old PC

Bernard wrote:
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:20:05 +0200, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Bernard wrote:
Hi there !

Could anyone give me a diagnosis on my hard disk problem ?

On an old Fujitsu, I had installed RedHat 6.0, a few years ago. It
worked for years
without any problem. Then, last june, I had a crash on a partition, and
I had to re-install, which I did only last week. At first, everything
seemed OK, but, after 2-3 days and about 3 ou 4 shutdown and startup, I
ran into a problem similar to that of last june, except that it occured
in /dev/hda5 instead of /dev/hdc3 last time :

'/dev/hda5 contains a filesystem with errors ! check forced...

... kernel panic, [file system] inconsistency... run fsck manually...'

at this point, I typed the root pasword as required, got dropped to a
shell, and typed:

'fsck /dev/hda5' :

'PASS 1 : Checking inodes, blocks and sizes... Duplicate blocks found
..... Invoking duplicate block passes... etc...

PASS 1B : Rescan for duplicate bad blocks... Duplicate bad blocks in
inode 55299 : 221452
55300 : 221453
55301 : 221454
... etc...

PASS 1C : Scan directories for inodes with dup blocks ..............
PASS 1D : Reconciling duplicate bad blocks

file ... (inode 55305, mod time Sat Aug26,2006 has 3 duplicate blocks
shared with 3 files.....

etc.., etc..,
/etc/mail...

Clone Duplicate bad blocks => Y

Pass 2 : checking directory structure : the '..' in /etc/mail (55299)
is missing... FIX => Y

PASS 4 : checking reference counts: inode 2 reference count is 15,
should be 16 FIX => Y, inode 18433 reference count is 27, should be 26
FIX => Y... etc... unattached inode 55301

etc...

PASS 5 : checking group summary information. Block bitmap differences
+221461 +221462 .... 221486... etc...

etc... etc... it took at least 15 minutes to fix everything, replying
'Y' to every ask. Then I got :

'/dev/hda5 : filesystem was modified. /dev/hda5 6703/110592 files (0.4%
non contiguous.

on reboot, I had:

/dev/hda5 clean
/dev/hdc2 clean
/dev/hdc3 clean

After so many fixings, I rather expected that it would not reboot
properly, but, so far, I have not found anything wrong in the repaired
system.

Last june, about the same thing had happened, not on /dev/hda5, but on
/dev/hdc3. There were so much fixing to be done, that I had given up.
This time, it happens on a newly re-installed system.

I suppose that a similar problem is going to happen again some time
sooner or later...

Thanks in advance for any useful input
Essentially it looks like the disk is falling apart.

Get a new disk, and reinstall on that.

Yes, but then, why did this happen last june on /dev/hdc3 and now in
/dev/hda5 ? These are two different disks (my PC has 3, the third one
being hdb). It seems curious that, after 8 years of good service, both
disks would give up at the same time or just about... I have heard of PC
lasting 15 years or more...

Mmm. We generally found SCSI disks gave up about 5 years in..

But don't discount the possibility that something - dust, temperature, or even a power failure - has damaged both at the same point.

However another possibility - that of a failing SCSI controller - exists..

The answer there is to borrow someone else's SCSI machine and try and mount and fsck the drives on that.

I have to say after many years of trying to be smart with disks, I simply bin them at the first sign of trouble.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Serious problem with Linux on an old PC
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