Can't get into any system except one

[kohno]

The story goes like this: After finishing playing with a newly installed ubuntu (/dev/sda6), I typed 'reboot' but it locked up at certain place, and I needed to switch the power off to get start again; that's where the woes began. After pressing Windows (/dev/sda1) at the grub menu, I only see a couple of lines like 'makeactive, chainloader' etc, then it hangs here. OK try again, this time my Gentoo system (/dev/sda3), guess what, I get:

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

I've been using this system for more than a week, how did this happen? Then I try the SystemRescueCD I placed on /dev/sda8 (yes, it can boot from a hardisk partition), it boots, only that it stays at "Letting udev process events..." for a while (so the maximum cylinder can be exceeded after all). From there, I can see all the partitions, and the files on them (so the hardisk seems ok). As SystemRescueCD is just a minimum system, I then try to boot the 2008.0 LiveCD, but it stuck at "Letting udev process events..." Of course, I can't boot into that ubuntu either, it just stuck somewhere, and because of the bootsplash, I can't see any messages.

I'm at my wits' end, any idea please?

[thestick]

maybe you got a bad sector?

[NathanZachary]

Have you tried booting up the SystemRescueCD and issuing an fsck?

[kohno]

OK, I fscked /dev/sda6, and got these:

Code: Select all

The problem has occurred looks like a hardware problem. If you have bad blocks, we advice you to get a new hard drive, because once you get one bad block that the disk drive internals cannot hide from your sight, the chances of getting more are generally said to become much higher (precise statistics are unknown to us), and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to you to risk your time and data on it. If you have just a few blocks, try writing to the bad blocks and see if the drive remaps the bad blocks (that means it takes a block it has in reserve and allocates it for use for of that block number). If it cannot remap the block, use badblock option (-B) with reiserfs utils to handle this block correctly.

bread: Cannot read the block (8210): (Input/output error).

zsh: abort     fsck.reiserfs /dev/sda6

I wonder how to try writing to the bad block and see if the drive remaps it or not.