Is my hard drive thrashed?
Fred Erickson
frederickson at iname.com
Thu Feb 15 23:11:43 UTC 2007
On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:50 -0700, Dan Hensley wrote:
> I'm using FC6. This morning when I turned on my computer, it booted up
> fine. I logged in fine. As soon as I logged in, I started Firefox. It
> seemed to take a long time and never came up. So I tried launching
> something else from the Gnome taskbar. It was unresponsive. I hit
> CTRL-ALT-BKSP to log out of X. It went to a text screen and I saw lots
> of messages about ata1 errors and non-responding ports and stuff like
> that. After a long while things didn't change, so I turned off the
> machine and tried booting again. The BIOS couldn't find my hard drive
> (the only SATA drive on the system). I replaced the drive cable, and
> after that the BIOS found the hard drive.
>
> When I try booting, I see the following grub message:
>
> GRUB
>
> At this point the computer hangs.
>
> So I booted up the rescue CD. I chrooted to my filesystem and ran
> grub-install /dev/sda. I had to do this about a month ago (I have no
> idea why), and that fixed the problem. But this time it did not fix the
> problem.
>
> My question is, how can I get out of this bind? Is my hard drive
> trashed, or just the boot record? Or is it something else? When I boot
> off the rescue CD the hard drive contents appear fine. I just can't get
> it to boot off my system.
>
> Nothing changed between yesterday except for yum-updating about 78 files
> including firefox.
>
> Thanks for any help,
> Dan
Hello Dan,
I'm fairly new to Linux so I can't offer any specific help but I can
tell you what happened to my computer yesterday and how I was able to
get it fixed. Maybe it will give you an idea for yours.
I have 2 hard drives on my system. Drive 1 had FC4, drive 2 has FC6. I
single boot to FC6 and have the drive with FC4 on mounted in my home
folder so I can transfer files as needed to FC6.
Yesterday, after updating about the same number of programs as you did,
including a new kernel, the computer wanted to reboot, so I attempted a
reboot and was stopped at the "GRUB" command as you were.
I didn't try anything at that point. I used my FC6 DVD and booted to
rescue mode (after looking at the disk with Knoppix & qtparted). From
the rescue prompt, sh-3.xx#, I entered the grub command. At the grub
prompt entered: root (hd1,0), then: setup (hd0), after grub finished, I
rebooted and my normal boot screen appeared and I was able to boot to
the new FC6 kernel.
Fred
More information about the users
mailing list