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pcdebb
birdbrain
Premium Member
join:2000-12-03
Brandon, FL
ARRIS DG1670

pcdebb

Premium Member

system wont boot

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I was about to do a data backup to cd but the program stopped responding. a kill command didnt work then the computer completely froze. I rebooted and keep getting an error message. will not go past this screen no matter what I do.

What exactly has failed? I'm unable to type anything at that prompt btw.
pcdebb

pcdebb

Premium Member

i think the short answer is my hard drive has just failed. I was still dual booted with windows, that BSOD horribly. I'm also hearing a wierd noise too.

gonna goto walmart now.....crying along the way

Selenia
Gentoo Convert
Premium Member
join:2006-09-22
Fort Smith, AR

1 recommendation

Selenia

Premium Member

Try a live distro. Check for errors using gparted. If the disk comes up clean, mount the partition, unplug all other devices, then try changing your /etc/fstab(using a text editor) to use device ID (/dev/sdx) instead of UUID for mounting(UUIDs usually don't change but I have seen freak incidents back at the ol' datacenter). If it comes up dirty, but gets "fixed", try a reboot. If the disk check cannot resolve anything, here is your chance to copy some of the valuable data from the readable partitions to try and save it. I say it likely is your hard drive, but I like to cover every base and give someone a possible opportunity to recover data. It could also be bad memory. Run memtest86+ to be sure it isn't. Corrupted memory=corrupted writes back to hard disk and can = some weird noise from the disk constantly seeking to read unreadable data. As I said, I believe it is the hard disk, but I would be very suspicious if the LiveCD don't boot of your memory or mobo. I doubt we will get as far as troubleshooting the mobo, so we'll stick with these steps, for now.

pcdebb
birdbrain
Premium Member
join:2000-12-03
Brandon, FL
ARRIS DG1670

pcdebb

Premium Member

I had the computer powered down while I went to walmart, didnt get a drive, but the computer did boot to the desktop. very slow, but it booted. I'm backing up as much as I can as quick as I can before something goes.

it's likely the hard drive. I just realized this drive has been chugging for over five years, and it's an IDE drive. I could have swore I upgraded it to sata. I will be tomorrow.

lugnut
@communications.com

lugnut to pcdebb

Anon

to pcdebb
Here are some tools which have saved my bacon more times than I can count.

First run HDD regenerator.

»www.dposoft.net/

It's not free but it's the best low level disk recovery utility I have ever used and is well worth the money.

2) After that, a couple of tools worth having and using are

a) RIPlinux »www.tux.org/pub/people/k ··· nux/rip/

b) The Ultimate Boot CD »www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Both are free GPL and useful for running fsck and repairing the directories after HDD regenerator has scanned, detected, repaired and recovered the blown sectors.

After that, you stand a good chance of recovering 99% of your data.

I've used this procedure at least a dozen times in the past decade or so and it's never failed me once. Unless the HDD is electrically dead, it will recover any data that can possibly be recovered.

Good luck...

rolfp
no-shill zone
Premium Member
join:2011-03-27
Oakland, CA

rolfp to pcdebb

Premium Member

to pcdebb
FWIW, dd_rescue, on the SystemRescueCd produced a full recovery of a Mandriva installation from a failing PATA drive, something like 49 bad sectors reported, for me.

nwrickert
Mod
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL

nwrickert to pcdebb

Mod

to pcdebb
said by pcdebb:

i think the short answer is my hard drive has just failed.

Yesterday I sat down in front of my computer. The light on the monitor switch was yellow, as usual, indicating that the graphics was off.

I moved the mouse, clicked "shift". Nothing happened.

My computer was dead, though apparently still running.

I forced a power off, then rebooted. It came up fine. After 15 minutes, the monitor went dead again, and the computer emitted a stream of beeps. It is now permanently dead.

I think the disk drive is okay. I have ordered a drive enclosure, so that I can look. Fortunately, I could take an older box out of mothballs, to get back on line.

(This is just in case you feel you want company in your misfortune).

In the meantime, life goes on.

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

leibold to pcdebb

MVM

to pcdebb
said by pcdebb:

I had the computer powered down while I went to walmart, didnt get a drive, but the computer did boot to the desktop.

Most disk drives these days have SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) and with smart utilities installed in the operating system can often alert you ahead of time about imminent drive failure.

Some drives (I'm not sure how widespread this feature is) also implement a user alert feature even if there is no SMART support in the OS. Those drives will refuse to spin up every 2nd power cycle to notify you about the recognized drive failure prediction while still giving you an opportunity to recover your data. Perhaps your drive is one of those since you were able to start it after a power cycle.

pcdebb
birdbrain
Premium Member
join:2000-12-03
Brandon, FL
ARRIS DG1670

pcdebb

Premium Member

May have been bad sectors, not sure, but I also will say that I've had some wierdness with certain programs. And since I didnt know how to really "uninstall" or fix they just sort of had a mind of their own

I had multiple partitions and still had a windows partition on here as well and was already talking about a clean slate, which I have done today. On Linix Mint 14 "Nadia" using XFCE. Dont know if I like it yet or not. It doesnt see my 80gb drive that I back up stuff to. I know its there, but it's not mounted or something. I get "No object for D-bus interface". googling for some sort of solution now.
pcdebb

pcdebb

Premium Member

problem is solved. got everything backed up and did a fresh Mint install. tried XFCE, hated it. On KDE now. Nice but apparently I was used to MATE. May go back to it but going to try and give KDE a chance (downloading the MATE distro just in case)

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

1 recommendation

leibold to pcdebb

MVM

to pcdebb
said by pcdebb:

May have been bad sectors, not sure,

Since you are running linux, you may want to install and run smartmontools (package name may differ) to check on the health of your harddisk(s). The program smartctl allows you to run tests and get reports while smartd continuously monitors your disks and logs any issues.

EUS
Kill cancer
Premium Member
join:2002-09-10
canada

EUS

Premium Member

I always wondered about smart monitoring.
Is it true that if the bios has smart monitoring, the O/S cannot?
I'd love to see it in the O/S, but am operating under the assumption mentioned above...

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

leibold

MVM

said by EUS:

Is it true that if the bios has smart monitoring, the O/S cannot?

As far as I know, that is not the case. There could be conflicts when using certain features (like running tests, but I don't think the bios does that anyway) but I don't see why there should be any problems reading the current drive status. I never had any issues and I have systems where smartd is running in Linux and smart is also enabled in the bios.

EUS
Kill cancer
Premium Member
join:2002-09-10
canada

EUS

Premium Member

Fantastic. Thanks.

pcdebb
birdbrain
Premium Member
join:2000-12-03
Brandon, FL

pcdebb to leibold

Premium Member

to leibold
okay, i will definitely put that on top of the to-do list

sempergoofy
Premium Member
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA

1 recommendation

sempergoofy to leibold

Premium Member

to leibold
leibold See Profile is right on the money with recommending SMART. The smartmontools and daemon are great for monitoring drives to get benefit from the predictive-failure-analysis (PFA) stuff that disk manufacturers have added to drives over the years. It won't catch 100% of failures, but you should always set it up to run the drive's built-in short and long-term tests and alert you to numbers that are trending toward trouble. What are those numbers? Well, that's some of the "art" of monitoring IMO. But disk drives today have information that they can provide to SMART and not taking advantage of it to protect your data is just wasting your time and data.

Figuring out just what you can do with configuring it can take some reading. But it is very powerful. I happen to use a 3ware RAID adapter for a hardware RAID-1 mirror and the array monitoring software from 3ware keeps an eye on the SMART data but it is up to me to cause the drives to test themselves. There are lots of nice examples in the smartd.conf file for different types of plain and sophisticated disk setups. I tweaked one example to make it appropriate for my specific needs. I include it just as an example.

# For each of the two hard drives in the array (0,1), start a Short "offline"
# test every day of the week during the 23:00 hour. And start a Long offline test
# every Sunday (weekday 7) morning during the 00:00 hour.
/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,0 -a -s (S/../.././23|L/../../7/00)
/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,1 -a -s (S/../.././23|L/../../7/00)
 

In a system without a special RAID adapter and other monitoring software, I would probably include additional parameters on the drive-specific line I would code to cause it to send me an email if something interesting was starting to happen.