[plug]

[speedster]

Sorry to make my first post to the list a problem!

Last Wednesday night my faithful old P166 firewall died. To be more
precise the motherboard had carked it.

Yesterday I picked up a Celeron 2.0, 256MB and a cheap mobo to
replace it (hell it's cheaper than trying to find a PII/III
secondhand).

Anyway, I put it all together and plugged the hdd (6.4GB Fujitsu
notebook drive - silence!) in, anticipating a quick fsck and then my
system would be up! I was wrong!

It came up with a kernel panic, unable to find init - on closer look
there was something wrong with the / partition and it couldn't mount
it (VFS error 22). No worries! In went the RH9 CD and booted to a
rescue prompt. I attempted to mount / in the rescue prompt but got:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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mount: unable to mount /dev/hda1: invalid argument
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

(can't remember exactly what was between mount and the error, but the
error was invalid argument).

fsck.ext3 said the superblock was invalid or corrupt, so I started
fsck using a backup superblock and away it went. Lots of bad inodes,
which it fixed, but when it got up to scanning directories it found a
lot of bad/duplicate blocks and wants to clone them. Leaving it on
automatic I left it, hoping in a few minutes it would be fine.

It's 13 hours and the fsck is still running. (spamming lots of
<filename> <mod time>, Mod time <date>. Clone bad/duplicate blocks?)

I have a funny feeling that the BIOS detected the wrong translation
type (LARGE) for the disk, instead of using CHS or LBA (unfortunately
I can't remember what it was using on the old P166), and if so - has
fsckíng the drive possibly destroyed the data completely? Just want
to know if there's a possible way I could retrieve anything off the
partition before formatting it. (I had my website, DNS zone files,
firewall config, dhcp config etc. on there, no backup)

Thanks!

Dean
___________________________________________________
"All your base are belong to us"

Dean A. Holland (Speedster)
Ph: 0407 778 027
email:
speedster at westnet.com.au
dholland at student.ecu.edu.au