Hard Drive Failure ? argh not again

2008 Oct 18 at 00:08 » Tagged as :toast, python,

Readers of this blog must be quite bored of my hard drive failures, but the sad fact is that I have another one on my hand. This time I know for sure that there isn't a hard ware fault the drive is a spanking new maxtor60Gb. I have reason to believe XFS was the culprit or it might have been partprobe or it might just be me.

On the previous occaision when I suffered a disk failure it was a loss of a partition table and one of those partitions was XFS. The partition couldn't be recovered despite all my efforts.

This hard drive was installed less than two weeks ago. It was just idling there when I decided to move /home from another drive onto it. The /home partition was getting filled up. I have been using it that way for a week when I suddenly decided to move the swap also onto it. That operation also worked without a glitch. I then deleted the swap patition and merged the newly created free space with the neigbouring partition using parted - no trouble there either.

Trouble occured when I decided to create another partition on the new drive to fill up the empty space and move all my photos onto it - I have a separate partition for that but it's filling up at an alarming rate. Like the fool I am I decided I will use XFS on it. And ran the mkfs.xfs command. All this was actually done while I was working on my macbook, the commands were type in using SSH. While mkfs was running, I noticed that it was painfully slow and in fact it seemed to get stuck close to the halfway mark.

At that time I walked upto the desktop to find the desktop gone. Or rather the XWindow desktop had disappeared. Ctrl-Alt-backspace brought me to the login screen but curiously all the usernames had disappeared. Since Fedora 9, I have been unable to get a console opened up with Ctrl+Alt+F1 either - but I could still open an xsession using the root account. Even then there were no noticable errors. So I tried what a windows user might have done - reboot.

On reboot the machine wouldn't start up. It complains about missing UUIDS - one of the missing UUIDs is the newly created swap and the other is /home so it's time for another boring and painfull recovery operation.