On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 09:34:23AM +0100, J Holley wrote:
> Dear all - my usually trusty AST Asentia laptop - has yet again trashed my
> linux (Redhat 5.1) partition after a save/restore machine state when the
> battery went flat in DOS - before I attempt to tackle a recovery - can
> anyone please suggest anyway to recover from :-
>
> "Kernal Panic - unable to mount root on VFS" ...
This just means that your ext2 partition is trashed sufficiently that
mount can't mount it read-only. I would suggest booting with a
self-contained rescue disk (I know Debian's install can do this, I'm sure
the others can as well) that pulls its tools in from a ramdisk, and run
e2fsck from there. You may have to manually pass in superblock addresses
to e2fsck ... just read the manpages and documentation for tips on
recovering really screwed up e2fs partitions.
> I would greatly appreciate any advice - anyone else had a problem with
> partition trashing after a battery failiure in DOS/win ?
Does the hibernate/suspend-to-disk feature work correctly on that laptop?
On my Thinkpad, you have to have a FAT partition on the first partition
of the root drive in order to hold the hibernation file, which is the
same size as the system's total RAM. It's possible that your laptop
assumes the same thing -- however, you have an ext2 filesystem there, and
the laptop automatically suspends to disk when the battery goes low in
DOS/Win (overwriting the ext2 filesystem that it knows nothing about).
That's the most logical explanation I can think of offhand, but there may
be other things going on.
--
Anderson MacKay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
