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HELP: can't boot into woody due to HD problem



I came home from work to find my debian box (woody) frozen - nothing was
displaying on the monitor, keyboard/mouse weren't doing anything either.

I rebooted the system, during the startup the various partitions were
being fscked as they had not been cleanly unmounted, and then while
/dev/hda9 (mounted as /var on my system) was being fscked, the following
error message popped up:

hda: irq timeout: Status=0x59 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequestError}
hda: irq timeout: error=0x40 {UnrecoverableError}: LBASect=19856947,
Sector=851980 
hda: dma timeout

and with that error message my system freezes at that point everytime I
try. All the other non-woody partitions on that HD are fine, I tried
booting into WinNT and it has no problems at all (none that I can see).

As far as I can tell, the problem seems to be only with the /dev/hda9
(/var) partition, and that's preventing the system from booting up.

For now, I have recovered all my data from that woody installation and
have switched to a potato installation that I have on another (much
newer) HD.

I tried mucking around with e2fsck to see if I could fix that partition
but I keep getting that error message.

Is there any way to repair that partition, and boot into that woody
installation ? What other options do I have ?

I'd appreciate any suggestions, tips, etc.

Thanks.

-- 
Salman Ahmed
ssahmed AT pathcom DOT com

http://www.pathcom.com/~ssahmed
GnuPG Key fingerprint = A6DB 6C85 DE5A 33BB E873  E437 58B2 09CD 977B 900B




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