[plug] weird boot hassles, corrupted fs?

[bk]

> im hoping its just the superblock thats gone, so i might try mounting with
> an alternate superblock

methinks the partition table is messed up together with a corrupted FS.
That's why I asked for an output of fdisk -l.

I've had my partitions "messed up" before -- one case being after I
installed win2k to test out how good it was (it was terribly slow). I
noticed that the first (w2k) partition and the second (linux /) had weird
ending blocks so I backed up the partition (linux / only of course), went
into fdisk, removed the partitions, added it again, booted up and it still
was working. This means only the partition table was slightly messed up,
not the FS.

Another case with my 486. Somehow, out of the blue, the harddrive didn't
want to work. This happened on the exact day/time when I was out to
purchases a SCSI drive for my new box (coincidence?) After a week of
trying to get it to work, I decided to dump the drive into an old
(spare) 486 and boot from a debian rescue disk, it was reading perfectly.
I thought that it would not work since the spare 486 didn't support LBA in
the BIOS but rather linux supprted a software emulated version, just like
DDO for DOS. Anyway, I found out that the IO card lost contact with the
slot.

	After I got it to detect, I had to fsck with backup superblock and
found that /etc,/lib,/boot were messed up or gone. Partition layout was
okay but the FS was corrupted.

	In his case, it could be both partition table corrupted and FS
corruption which could mean the drive is dying.

I hope this helps you.

-David (bk at bofh.ns.ca).