One of my first Linux servers has just had a hdd go bad. Well sort of.....I
think.
It is a RH9 install on a Pentium 200 running samba and winbind integrated as
a 'member server' in an NT4 domain.
About a 9months ago I added a single IDE 160GB HDD and moved all of data
onto it. I couldn't believe Linux recognised and allocated the entire 160GB
when only 8gb was visible in bios. This was my personal file server at work
where I keep deployment images, drivers and other misc software for general
use around the network.
It ran solidly without reboot until recently I noticed directories
disappearing from the file structure and throughput dropped to a crawl. I
foolishly rebooted the unit as this tends to solve any trouble I have with
m$ servers and it got stuck during boot process at the fsck of the device
saying the superblock was ......... {bad, or short read or something} and
dropped into single user mode.
I removed the drive entry from /etc/fstab and rebooted normally, then set
out to repair.
I tried fsck /dev/hdc1 and got the superblock error with short read and a
suggestion to try......
fsck /dev/hdc1 -b 8193 and get the same error.
When I ran fdisk /dev/hdc and used the P command it showed to drive as
having no partitions.
Now I don't have anything on that drive that is vital, otherwise I would
have backed it up. But I'd still like to recover the drive as an exercise in
improving my linux skills. The drive used to contain a single partition
formatted with ext3 filesystem. It is still recognised by bios, spins up and
appears to be ready to have a partition and file system installed.
So, Can I just create a partition with fdisk and run fsck again to repair?
Do I have to mkfs again?
What options or methods would you use in this situation?
Even if the top level directories and files where unrecognisable I could
still make sense of the lower directories and file which should remove
intact after repair?
Thanks
Andre
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