Re: Phantom partition, anyone?
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.
The third partition looks normal to me. Unlike other disc labels,
the MicroSoft disc label allows a potentially infinite number of
volumes. Your /dev/hda3 is an extended partition which contains
other logical volumes within it. It seems that cfdisk is simply
hiding this detail from you. Logical volumes always start numbering
at 5, so /dev/hda5 is the first logical volume inside the /dev/hda3
container, and /dev/hda6 is the second. It seems that you may have
an entry in /etc/fstab indicating that there is a file system for
/dev/hda3, and it should be mounted. This is not true. I'd check
/etc/fstab.
Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
gsf
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