Well, I thought that the introduction of the ext3 (and higher) file systems had stopped all of the problems of disk crashes and mangled filesystems on linux.
But, after a few years of reliable operation the root filesystem on my home server (my old Fujitsu Siemens laptop) seems to have mangled.
The symptoms were....not booting - you get the 'Starting up......' message during boot then the system appears to hang. But if you listen carefully you hear that the disk is actually doing something. So I left it for a few hours.....
When I came back to it there was a 'failed to mount /dev/sda1' type error message, with an option to skip mounting or manually fix it.
I went for manually fixing it, because not mounting the root filesystem will not get me very far.
This dropped me into a single user shell.
I ran fsck and it said that an Inode has illegal blocks. I selected the option to clear them...and again said yes when it asked me again.
It then said it was restarting e2fsck from the beginning, and spent quite a few minutes checking....
Then at Pass 2 fsck said it had found a deleted or unused inode. Again I said 'y' to the 'Clear?' question....
Then lots of offers to fix things (to the extent that I just held my finger on the 'y' key...)
Then fsck announced that it was complete and I should re-boot linux. Re-ran fsck and it announced that /dev/sda1 was clean, so re-booted.....but booting is taking a suspiciously long time.....like it has been trying for 10 minutes and hasn't got past the boot up splash screen...I'm going to need a plan B...
Well, I don't know what the problem is. Tried booting off a USB memory stick, and the disk checks ok and mounts, but the boot process just hangs. I decided I had spent too long on this so it is currently installing Ubuntu 10.10 on the disk instead, so can't try any more diagnosis!
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