Re: power outage now linux problem

[David Stern <dstern@u.washington.edu>]

On Wed, 23 Dec 1998 20:54:10 EST, AJ wrote:
> ok the power in my house just went out and when linux tries to boot it
> goes and checks my inodes and junk and then gets to a part and says:
> 
> Problem: block on freelist at 06fbbc90 isnt free
> 
> over adn over and doesnt boot it lets me type but i have no clue what to
> do..

I think what's going on is that e2fsck is looking to repair files on a 
block that your ide hard drive automatically checked out as bad.  Since 
ide hard drives do this at a very low level (firmware), there's no way 
for you to interact without very expensive proprietary software.  OTOH, 
if you have a scsi drive, then your controller may have software which 
allows you to interact with this process.

If you have a backup, this would be a good time to restore.  If you 
don't have a backup, there's a pretty small chance that any critical 
programs were on the bad block, so depending on how mission-critical 
your box is, you may wnat to forget about it or else wait a couple 
weeks for slink to release and then upgrade.  You also may have lost 
data files on a bad block, but there's nothing you can do about that if 
you don't have a backup.

Files that were partially recovered by e2fsck will be in the lost+found 
directory for the relevant partition, so you'll want to look in all 
your lost+found directories. If you want more information, see the 
Ext2fs-Undeletion and Partition mini-howto's.

If you're new to Linux, you may want to note that ext2 filesystems are 
a little more sensitive than fat filesystems, so you should expect 
there to be some errors when the power goes out, although not always 
bad blocks.  You also might want to consider investing in a ups.
-- 
David
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                                               dstern@u.washington.edu