bad block, reiserfs, reiserfsck, etc: can't boot

sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

really hoping someone can help here. after a forced hard reset of my Thinkpad x40 (X locked up), i find that i'm no longer able to boot.

after progressing part way through the boot sequence, i'm getting an error that says:

sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

one additional bit of info - it's not a hard drive problem, or at least not one that affects the non-Linux partitions. i can log in successfully to the Windows partition on the same machine.

i'm really hoping someone will say you're not screwed.
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/carlito · Guru Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 450 Location: Belgium

Are you by any chance running reiserfs? I've had the exact same problem yesterday and fixed it by booting my rig with a live cd and running reiserfschk --rebuild-tree.
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sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

i am indeed. let me try doing just that.
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sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

ok, had a bit of a time b/c i somehow did not have reiser4progs installed, but got that in and ran reiserfsck.

unfortunately, i'm getting an error that says:

/carlito · Guru Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 450 Location: Belgium

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe it's not very wise to run reiserfschk on a mounted drive..

Anyway, i hope it worked for!
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sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

unfortunately, that didn't work for me. i ran it, and got the following:

sog · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2004 Posts: 356

ok, i've toned down my ambitions: now i'd just like to extract whatever information i can from the corrupted reiser volume.

any idea how i might do that? trying to boot into Linux causes kernel panic, and i can't mount the volume to chroot into it.

the data, however, is clearly still there. the question now is how i get access to it and save what i can before i replace the actual drive.
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troymc · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 553

First, never mount a possibly corrupt filesystem. The reason why is that the kernel periodically sync's all drives & that write could corrupt it further. So you don't need to mount the filesystem, just run the tools on the device [like you did - you ran the tool correctly, you just didn't need to mount the device before doing it].

Hopefully you have smartmontools on one of those boot CDs. Try running something like this:

Hoshimaru · Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 7:08 pm Post subject:

Interesting information... however, this doesn't work for me. It simply refuses to repair my bad blocks.
First only /dev/sda7 (root) was ruined, but today I also noticed sda8 aka /home is destroyed... sigh... last time I buy a Maxtor hard disk. > 187GB of data is lost, among wich was my 10 year old email archive.

This really sucks... I'm getting afraid of using reiserfs as well now...
* hopes his ext3 laptop will have more luck *

troymc · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 553

Hoshimaru · Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 9:24 am Post subject:

Problems started after the power got abruptly cut in the entire street a few days ago.
Afterwards, it booted again, did some replay on the journal and continued.

First thing I noticed was Gnome being a little slower than usual to respond. When I reused that PC after a few days, it got worse. After doing shutdown -r now, it couldn't mount the root partition anymore.

With the 2006.0 livecd I did a badblocks check, resulting in a 4K file full of blocknumbers.
reiserfsck suggested to use --rebuild-tree, which I did... I get a huge list of

Gentree · Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:22 am Post subject:

chiwi · Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 11:24 pm Post subject:

Hi there, i'm having the same issues here.

I've run the badblocks cmd and used the output with reiserfsck. The thing is that it seems that the badblocks are part of the section where the journal is...then it cannot do anything, nor apply the changes.

I've done some searching on google,and found an application called Nucleus Kernel reiserFS, which works fine. At least I can see the files in the partition....the downside is that I only could get a demo, and in the demo, you only can see the files, not copy them to another partition....mmm =/ (anyone has the full version? =) )

So, if the partition "crashes" everytime it tries to read the journal....Is it possible to mount the partition without reading it ? I only want to do it in order to get some data...after i do so, i'll format everything, or get myself a new HD, but i really need to get that info from the HD. The mount man page only talks about replaying the uncommited data, i haven't found the way to disable the journal.

Thanks all

yo.

Gentree · Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 11:42 pm Post subject:

well it wont disable the journalling (AFAIK that's not an option , reiserfs is a journalling fs) but maybe if you turn off the autocheck in /etc/fstab it may have the result you want. End the line for this partition with 0 0

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chiwi · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:53 am Post subject:

but the partition is not even being able to mount. It returns input/output error while trying to read the journal...do you think this is gonna work ?

thanks

yo.

chiwi · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 4:45 pm Post subject:

Gentree · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:35 pm Post subject:

I must say with a price tag of $459US I may be inclined to look for a less "professional" solution. I find that pretty dishonest for a FS recovery tool.

man mkreiserfs

chiwi · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:45 pm Post subject:

Gentree · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:53 pm Post subject:

chiwi · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:00 pm Post subject:

Gentree · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:05 pm Post subject:

well it seems that reiserfsck should be that tool, but you say it's borked.

not surprised, I dont rate reiserfs at all.

see if you can find a bug report.

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Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
Gentoo because I'm a masochist
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86

Gentree · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 7:13 pm Post subject:

chiwi · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 7:22 pm Post subject:

alright, let's move forward the raw backup. I've got a Thinkpad t42, 20gb with windows (ntfs), 19Gb with gentoo, reiserfs, 100Mb /boot, etx2 and 512Mb Swap partition. All of them Primary partitions. Now, I know that writing is not possible to a ntfs filesystem, then the raw backup to the ntfs partition is impossible. But, i've got another box at home, which has gentoo installed as well... May be I can dd to that box...is that possible ? some way to 'pipe' it the dd output to that box ? may be if I mount a dir with samba, it'll work....

any idea ??

how am I supposed to use the dd command ? Does it output everything to a single file ? how does it work ?

thankssssss

yo.

Gentree · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:42 pm Post subject:

if I follow you it's the thinkpad that has blown out the reiserfs , so you have no gentoo anymore just an XP? Limits the options. Can you boot it off a liveCD?

man dd

it does raw byte by byte data from one device to another. In the case of a borked partition you can clone the mess with

dd if=/dev/<borked> of=/dev/<good unmounted dev>

the target must be free, unmounted and at least as large as the source. Equally src dev must not me mounted.

so the easiest is if you can plug both drives into the same system . If not you may be able to get a device interface over nfs. I'm pretty vague on that so you'll have to follow it up yourself.

If you can get the raw data across it will appear as an identically broken reiserfs to the host system.

Then you are a bit freer to hack it about since it's just a copy.

_________________
Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
Gentoo because I'm a masochist
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86