Re: Disk Corruption

["Jonathan Brandmeyer" <jbrandmeyer@earthlink.net>]

ajlewis wrote:
> If you cannot get mounted on anything and can't find a partition table
with
> 'fdisk /dev/hdb' then you might want to try gpart or rescuept for finding
> the partition info and then rewriting the table with fdisk.

--snip--
> Forget this!  I was thinking of booting with a rescue disk.  If your boot
> floppy gets the system booted, then I would think that / is fine.

> Maybe the output from df and 'fdisk -l' would give some ideas here.  I was
> thinking running lilo would help, but I see that it has not.


All right, I ran gpart on hda and hdb and recieved the following output.  I
installed gpart with apt-get, so I don't think that my partitions are really
toasted.  The gpart output passes a basic reality check.  The fdisk output
looks strange to me in that hdb5~=hdb4, but cfdisk reports hdb5 as being
about 2GB.  So, maybe that is the expected output.  The output from df is
also what I expected.

As another data point, the last operational cycle, before adding the
partition, was the first time that /dev/hda1 and /dev/cdrw were mounted,
with the following fstab entrys:
/dev/hda1    /winxp    ntfs    ro,user    0    2
/dev/cdrw    /cdrw    iso9660,udf    ro,user, noauto
The 2.4.18 kernel has ntfs read-only support built as a module, and
/dev/cdrw is a symlink to /dev/sr1.

What if I am going about this the wrong way?  Suppose that MBR(s) is/are
damaged?  Will fsck(8) detect this type of damage?  My reading of the man
page says that it doesn't.

Thanks,
Jonathan

-- data follows --

Here is the information from gpart:
gpart /dev/hdb
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(486MB), offset(0MB)
Possible partition(Linux swap), size(972MB), offset(486MB)
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(29298MB), offset(1459MB)
Possible extended partition at offset(30757MB).
Killed the application during scan after 2 hours. (searching the free space)

gpart /dev/hda
Possible partition (Windows NT/W2K FS), size(19092MB), offset(0MB)

Guessed primary partition table:
Primary partition(1)
    type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX)
    size: 19092MB #s(39102144) s(63-39102206)
    chs:  (0/1/1)-(1023/254/63)d (0/1/1)-(2433/254/60)r
Primary partition(2)
    unused
Primary partition(3)
    unused
Primary partition(4)
    unused

Here is the information from fdisk -l
device      boot  Start   End        Blocks          ID    System
/dev/hda1    *    1        2434    19551073+     7    HPFS/NTFS

/dev/hdb1    *    1            62        497983+   83    Linux
/dev/hdb2        63            86        996030      82   Linux swap
/dev/hdb3      187        3921    30001387+    83   Linux
/dev/hdb4    3922        4164      1951897+      5   Extended
/dev/hdb5    3922        4164      1951866      83   Linux

Here is the information from df -h
Filesys           Size      Used      Avail     Use%    Mounted on
/dev/hdb1    471M    390M      56M     88%      /
/dev/hdb3      28G        12G      15G     42%      /usr
Trying to open MFT
/dev/hda1      19G         18G    848M    96%      /winxp