Re: Phantom partition, anyone?
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 07:15:32PM -0400, Gabriel Farrell wrote:
> 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
The extended partion is a Microsoft kludge to get around the limit
of four primary partitions (in effect it uses one of the primary
partitions to contain more partitions).
Deleting your extended partition would be a bad idea unless you
really know what you are doing.
As you only have four partitions (excluding the extended partiton),
you could do away with it, but only if you move hda5 and hda6 to
primary partition - which with fdisk would require removing hda3,
hda5 and hda6, and then creating new hda3 and hda4 primary
partitions for swap and home.
I suspect your boot problem is more likely to be an error in
your /dev/fstab file, such as an entry telling the system
that hda3 is an ext3 filesystem that should be checked...
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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