Re: [PLUG] grub or hosed?

[Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com>]

jeff wrote:

Gordon Dexter wrote:
  

What does fdisk say?  If your partition table might be damaged it would 
be the first program I'd go to.  Right after getting all data in /home 
backed up to a separate drive(!).
    

id's the drive and its partitions correctly.
fsck goes over it for a while, tells me the disk has been changed and I 
still can't mount the OS partition.

I *can* mount /HOME, albeit slowly and with weird permissions.
  

At this point I'd get all data off of /home (while you still can? with symptoms like this I wouldn't be shocked if you ended up losing /home like you did /).

Run SpinRite (not free but highly recommended) or some other disk health program.  Check Smart status of the drive as well.  Although partition table problems would explain your situation, it doesn't rule out the possibility that the disk is dying.  So keep that backup safe.

Double check your backup, then use a disk wiping solution such as DBAN to completely eradicate the partition table and everything on the disk.  Then go into fdisk completely recreate the partition table, then create filesystems.

Sound like a pain?  Yeah, but I'm going under the assumption that you really don't want to lose your data, and the safest thing to do if you're not completely certain that the partition table is kosher is to nuke and recreate it.  Trying to do stuff with a sketchy partition table could result in data written on one partition overwriting data in another partition, or any number of other unfortunate things that end in data loss.

--Gordon

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug