Hullo and Happy Diwali
This is an urgent message for help.
I have 2 hard disks on my system:
-the primary master (hda) is a win98 drive: this is a 40 GB HDD.
But because the motherboard is a Pentium II @350mhz,
only 33GB of this HDD is usable.
-the primary slave (hdb) is a Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 drive a 20 GB
drive.
(hdb had developed bad sectors some months back which were
successfully removed by the service centre of the
manufacturer)
The system was set up to boot using grub with linux as the
default.
In a series of disasters my system has crashed and I need help.
Below are the steps leading up to the crash:
1. Yesterday while working on Linux, I needed to copy some files
to the windows drive, for which I mounted the drive read/write.
However, I did not unmount before shutting down the system. At the
time of shutting down there was some message from Linux
about some error on the drive, which it had repaired.
2. On restarting the computer, I tried to boot into windows and
there was an error message to the effect: "invalid
executable file format. Press any key to continue". I then booted
into linux
3. The linux system was working fine but showed the contents of
hda as nothing.
4. Attempting to mount hda using "mount" failed with the message
"damaged superblock or too many drives mounted etc."
5. Running fdisk from linux correctly showed hda as a win95 FAT32
system. When asked to verify the partition table it showed
"62 unallocated sectors".
6.I tried to boot into windows again I could not. Using a win98
rescued disk and running fdisk from the disk, I was given
partition
information. The information showed that C drive is Primary Dos
drive but its file system is "unknown".
7. I booted again into linux and tried e2fsck with various -b
options. They all failed with the message to the effect that
the superblocks were damaged and a "magic number" was missing.
8. Then things started to happen to hdb (the linux drive). WHile
working the system froze. I could see a lot of activity was going
on
on the hard drive but to no avail. There were also sounds also of
the system desperately trying to make the drive work but it
failed.
9. I had to force a reboot. I could reboot into linux but before
that grub did show an error message from which it recovered.
10. This time also the system froze in between working and I had
to reboot. On this reboot, there was no success because
BIOS reported the Primary Slave HDD as having "failed". After
which, the linux system became inaccessible too.
The whole system has ground to a halt with data on both drives.
11. Doing fdisk /mbr on drive C has failed.
QUESTIONS
-------------------
1. hdb failure is a case of hardware failure so the only options
are to get it fixed. Is this right?
2. As regards hda, the FAT is missing/damaged. SO the system is
unreadable to win98. Is there any way of a
"software" recovery of the contents or do I have to go in for a
"hard disk data recovery" option.
3. Is the damaged superblock on hda a result of not unmounting the
drive before shutting down linux. Or is it due the fact
that the linux drive itself developed errors and therefore while
shutting down, wrote wrong information on hda?
4. In other words are the problems of the two hard disks related
to each other or are they unrelated: hda crashed because it
was not unmounted cleanly and hdb crashed because of some hardware
failure?
5. Supposing a non-linux drive is mounted rw on linux and then not
unmounted, is this what will result always or is there
a way in which linux can unmount such a drive safely?
Will be grateful for early responses.
Pramathesh
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