[WBEL-users] Server hard disk failure

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 22:40 +0100, Francies Moore wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> One of my WBEL servers has crashed due to the failure of one of its hard 
> disks.  My hardware support technician (a recent Linux convert) says it 
> could be a filesystem failure.  Is such a thing possible on a machine 
> which was doing nothing over Easter?  I thought Linux was more stable 
> than "that other system" in this regard.
> 
> Whatever happened to it, it cannot reboot as the ext3 journal cannot get 
> its head around the situation.
> 
> How do I recover what is left on the surviving hard disk (which contains 
> the operating system and some user files)?  Do I revert to ext2 by 
> deleting the journal and changing the fstab?  If so, where do I find the 
> journal file, and what is it called?
> 
> Can I go back to ext3 when a new HD is fitted?
----
try booting - when it fails, enter the root passwd (if asked for)
and then try...

e2fsck -fy /dev/hdXY

where X is the drive letter
 - a=primary, master
 - b=primary, slave
 - c=secondary, master
 - d=secondary, slave
 - (more drives? - et al)
where Y is the partition involved...

if it boots, then /boot is OK which is generally (but not
always) /dev/hda1

so repair partitions 2-9 - don't be alarmed if you get errors about not
locating 'superblock' at this point. That may not be a valid partition.
Generally partition 4 is extended partition and not a partition at all
but partitions 5-9 would likely be located inside partition 4

Good luck

Craig