Well, I've managed to make matters worse on my desktop. Before doing a clean install, I decided to clean up my partitions a tad. There's an old partition that used to be /boot until new requirements made it too small and was just sitting there, unmounted, so I used a LiveCD and Gparted to remove it. Then, I added it to /home. Alas, the program hung before completing the job and now, the partition's unrecognizable. Gparted can't correct it and parted can't read it. Using e2fsck from a command line tells me that the superblock is wrong, and I can't work out how to find out where to tell me to look. And, probably because of this, my installation now hangs before it gets far enough for me to get to a CLI. I do have a reasonably recent backup, if all goes bad, but I'd rather not have to use it. Does anybody know how to find it, or otherwise recover the partition? I'm tempted to use touch /forcefsck, to see if that works, but somehow, I doubt it. Advice, or pointers to suggestions will be very, very welcome.
On 02/04/13 00:39, Joe Zeff wrote:
Well, I've managed to make matters worse on my desktop. Before doing a clean install, I decided to clean up my partitions a tad. There's an old partition that used to be /boot until new requirements made it too small and was just sitting there, unmounted, so I used a LiveCD and Gparted to remove it. Then, I added it to /home. Alas, the program hung before completing the job and now, the partition's unrecognizable. Gparted can't correct it and parted can't read it. Using e2fsck from a command line tells me that the superblock is wrong, and I can't work out how to find out where to tell me to look. And, probably because of this, my installation now hangs before it gets far enough for me to get to a CLI. I do have a reasonably recent backup, if all goes bad, but I'd rather not have to use it. Does anybody know how to find it, or otherwise recover the partition? I'm tempted to use touch /forcefsck, to see if that works, but somehow, I doubt it. Advice, or pointers to suggestions will be very, very welcome.
I've been chsing something like this for a few days. My laptop (Scientific Linux 6, 32-bit) suddenly failed to complete booting because it couldn't find -lv_home. The original configuration is at /etc/lvm/archive and /etc/lvm/backup, and these are identical except that one was before and one after executing /sbin/vgs ..... That file no longer exists, The lvm2 package that includes tools like vgcfgrestore seems to have been uninstalled too - something to do with initscripts, I think. There's a recent bugzilla that might have something to do with my problem here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=800801
I don't know how different all this is from the latest-and-greatest but it might be relevant.
Well, I've managed to make matters worse on my desktop. Before doing a clean install, I decided to clean up my partitions a tad. There's an old partition that used to be /boot until new requirements made it too small and was just sitting there, unmounted, so I used a LiveCD and Gparted to remove it. Then, I added it to /home. Alas, the program hung before completing the job and now, the partition's unrecognizable. Gparted can't correct it and parted can't read it. Using e2fsck from a command line tells me that the superblock is wrong, and I can't work out how to find out where to tell me to look. And, probably because of this, my installation now hangs before it gets far enough for me to get to a CLI. I do have a reasonably recent backup, if all goes bad, but I'd rather not have to use it. Does anybody know how to find it, or otherwise recover the partition? I'm tempted to use touch /forcefsck, to see if that works, but somehow, I doubt it. Advice, or pointers to suggestions will be very, very welcome.
Firstly, your probably screwed. fsck has one job and that's to make the file system consistent. It's not a disaster recovery tool. All it cares about is that the fs should make sense on next reboot.
Questions that may help find out what went wrong. Which distro are you using and what tools and procedures did you use to "add it to /home"? Is your /home in an LVM?
You probably need to be clear about exactly what you mean by added what was /boot to /home...
What did the partition table look like before and after you did the work?
was /boot before /home and you enlarged /home to be /home+/boot (the partition before /home?)?
On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
Well, I've managed to make matters worse on my desktop. Before doing a clean install, I decided to clean up my partitions a tad. There's an old partition that used to be /boot until new requirements made it too small and was just sitting there, unmounted, so I used a LiveCD and Gparted to remove it. Then, I added it to /home. Alas, the program hung before completing the job and now, the partition's unrecognizable. Gparted can't correct it and parted can't read it. Using e2fsck from a command line tells me that the superblock is wrong, and I can't work out how to find out where to tell me to look. And, probably because of this, my installation now hangs before it gets far enough for me to get to a CLI. I do have a reasonably recent backup, if all goes bad, but I'd rather not have to use it. Does anybody know how to find it, or otherwise recover the partition? I'm tempted to use touch /forcefsck, to see if that works, but somehow, I doubt it. Advice, or pointers to suggestions will be very, very welcome. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.**org/mailman/listinfo/usershttps://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/**Mailing_list_guidelineshttp://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
On 04/02/2013 01:59 AM, Junk wrote:
Firstly, your probably screwed. fsck has one job and that's to make the file system consistent. It's not a disaster recovery tool. All it cares about is that the fs should make sense on next reboot.
If it were able to do that, I'd be OK. PartedMagic can see the data, and I may be able to copy it from there to a partition on a different drive.
Questions that may help find out what went wrong. Which distro are you using and what tools and procedures did you use to "add it to /home"? Is your /home in an LVM?
I thought I said: Fedora 17. No LVM, although I didn't mention that. As a home user, I don't need to resize things dynamically, and LVM is the solution to a problem I don't have.
On 04/02/2013 06:40 AM, Roger Heflin wrote:
You probably need to be clear about exactly what you mean by added what was /boot to /home...
What did the partition table look like before and after you did the work?
was /boot before /home and you enlarged /home to be /home+/boot (the partition before /home?)?
Actually, I don't have or need a separate /boot any more, and it's not used. (It was too small, at about 250 MB, anyway.) Nothing was in it and it hadn't been mounted in several years, so I got rid of it to tidy up. As it was just before /home, I tried to expand /home to include it and that's when the program hung. I thought I explained that in my original message, but either I didn't, or if I did, it wasn't clear enough.
On 02/04/13 19:09, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 04/02/2013 01:22 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
I don't know how different all this is from the latest-and-greatest but it might be relevant.
I don't use any LVM, so probably not. Good luck with getting your laptop working again.
I tried the Scientific Linux list and was advised that the missing lvm tools were probably responsible for my problem. I don't know why they got uninstalled - it might have been an SL6/Centos6 initscripts effect - but fortunately I had 3 compatible packages in cache and was able to reinstall. vgscan, lvscan, reboot back to normal; great!
I think I agree that lvm is 'a solution to a problem I don't have', but it was there originally and life seemed difficult when it vanished.
On 2 Apr 2013, at 19:21, Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
On 04/02/2013 06:40 AM, Roger Heflin wrote:
You probably need to be clear about exactly what you mean by added what was /boot to /home...
What did the partition table look like before and after you did the work?
was /boot before /home and you enlarged /home to be /home+/boot (the partition before /home?)?
Actually, I don't have or need a separate /boot any more, and it's not used. (It was too small, at about 250 MB, anyway.) Nothing was in it and it hadn't been mounted in several years, so I got rid of it to tidy up. As it was just before /home, I tried to expand /home to include it and that's when the program hung. I thought I explained that in my original message, but either I didn't, or if I did, it wasn't clear enough.
I think it might be to do with moving the start of the partition. I see from the docs that Parted can't move the start of an ext2 or ext3 partition so I'm guessing your home was ext4 or something amenable. Probably the moving of the start of a partition involves shifting big wodges of data around. You might have interpreted this as your system freeze and turned it off before it had finished, maybe. This is a guess. I might spend a fun evening moving the start of partitions in VM's to see what happens and how long it takes.
Junk.
On 04/02/2013 11:47 AM, Junk wrote:
I think it might be to do with moving the start of the partition. I see from the docs that Parted can't move the start of an ext2 or ext3 partition so I'm guessing your home was ext4 or something amenable. Probably the moving of the start of a partition involves shifting big wodges of data around. You might have interpreted this as your system freeze and turned it off before it had finished, maybe. This is a guess. I might spend a fun evening moving the start of partitions in VM's to see what happens and how long it takes.
Possible, but I don't think I saw any disk activity. I do know that the computer was responsive while it was working (I was checking some other things.) except that the gparted window didn't properly redraw after being covered. And yes, the partition is supposed to be ext4.
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Joe Zeff -
John Pilkington -
Junk -
Roger Heflin