At some point a little while ago I started getting the following
message at boot time:
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /shome] fsck.ext3 -a -C0 /dev/hda3
fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
read while trying to open /dev/hda3
Could this be a zero-length partition?
fsck died with exit status 8
The booting up of my machine (unstable on a Thinkpad x31) stops there,
and I'm told to manually fix the partition table. If I don't do
anything, and Ctrl-D to exit the repair shell, bootup continues and
everything seems to work fine.
If I print the partition table in fdisk I get (notice how hda3
overlaps hda5 and hda6):
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 665 5027368+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 666 1569 6834240 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 1570 5168 27208440 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1570 1724 1171768+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6 1725 5168 26036608+ 83 Linux
In cfdisk, however, the partition table looks like this (notice the
lack of an hda3):
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary NTFS 5148.06
hda2 Primary Linux ext3 [/] 6998.27
hda5 Logical Linux swap / Solaris 1199.93
hda6 Logical Linux ext3 [/home] 26661.52
I never created an hda3 during installation, and I don't know where it
came from. I'm tempted to just delete it, but I'm afraid that would
cause irreperable damage.
Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
gsf