[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       suse-linux-e
Subject:    Re: [SLE] [LILO,HD] BIG BIG EMERGENCY!
From:       Wolly <wwolly () gmx ! net>
Date:       2001-09-30 21:30:55
[Download RAW message or body]

> ERRORS:
> =======
> error 0x40 uncorrectable error LBAsect=9 sector=0
> end_request: I/O error dev 03:00 (hda) sector
> unable to read partition table
>
Dear Oliver, 

unless I am terribly wrong, you have a physical problem with your hd. 
You get an I/O error which means that the hd could not read the sector 
containing the partition table. 
I can imagine two reasons: 
1) you changed the BIOS settings for LBA access and the like 
  [in this case: undo the changes and re-try]
2) a block on your hd went bad after the last boot. 
  [in this case: prepare yourself for a lot of work...]
IMHO, lilo has nothing to do with that. 

You could try & run badblocks on /dev/hda from a rescue system to 
check for bad blocks (this will NOT change anything on your hd). 

If you know the byte offset of your partitions on hda, you could try and 
copy the partitions to image files on another hd by issuing 
> dd if=/dev/hda of=imagefile skip=OFF bs=512 count=N
OFF: partition offset in 512b blocks from beginning of hda
  This will skip the bad block at the beginning of the hd.
N: size of partition in 512b blocks (a too big value does not do any 
  harm here but a too small one is bad)
[A quick test on my box showed that skip=63 for hda1 for my hd.]

Note that this will fail in case 
1) your offset is larger than 2Gb (could use a shell script and a pipe 
  or quickly patch dd sources to deal with that case.)
2) you have bad blocks on the partition

Now, if you did that correctly, you should be able to mount the image 
file via loopback device: 
> losetup /dev/loop0 imagefile
> mount /dev/loop0 /mnt -txyz   # xyz is filesystem type: ext2, reiserfs...
and get file files in /mnt/

So, the first thing you have to find is the small piece of paper where you 
noted down your partition table....
There could be other ways to get the start of a file system (e.g. finding the 
ext2 magic number). 

HTH,
Wolly

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]