question about fsck failing during startup

[Leonard]

scar wrote:
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> Leonard Chatagnier @ 12/09/2009 09:48 AM:
>    
>> --- On Wed, 12/9/09, scar<scar at drigon.com>  wrote:
>> Werner Schram @ 12/09/2009 04:29 AM:
>>      
>>> You can check the status of your hard disk with palimpsets, which is
>>> available under System->administration->Disk Utility.
>>>        
>> i can't find that. must not be installed. i checked add/remove programs
>> and there is no 'disk utility'.  i also tried apt-get install
>> palimpsets, but it cannot find the package.  is it available only for
>> 9.10? (i am still on 9.04)
>>
>> lchata at karmic-desktop:~$ aptitude search palimpsets
>> lchata at karmic-desktop:~$ aptitude search disk-util
>> i   gnome-disk-utility              - manage and configure disk drives and media
>> lchata at karmic-desktop:~$
>>      
> yeah, only available for 9.10 and up. :\
>
>
>
>    
Well, you can upgrade to Karmic or google for "linux disk utilities", 
download the isos and burn to disc
then boot from disc and do what you want.  testdisk-6.10 is one I've 
used.  ubcd411.iso is another and some
googling should find you several more.  I could be wrong but I feel 
pretty sure your install disk for 9.04 has
some utilities to use.  Have you explored the disc to see what it has 
installed and have you ran the aptitude
search command I showed above on your 9.04 system?  If disk-util doesn't 
pick up something on your 9.04
just use disk and see what comes up.  Then using aptitude show will tell 
you what the program does and other info.
FWIW, now that you have marked the bad blocks there is a fairly good 
chance you troubles are over.  I have
a fairly old HDD on an old Dell tower which got corrupted by fsck and 
couldn't be fixed with repeated fscking.
I downloaded the two mentioned above and did a lot of reading on how to 
use it(highly recommended you do to)
and then started playing around trying to recover the OS.  Nothing got 
it to boot even though it recovered missing
files.  So went out and bought a second hand drive, installed and added 
Ubuntu to it, but left the old drive in place.
On a hunch, I reformatted the failed drive and reinstalled ubuntu on it 
and it still works fine today.  Just to let you
know that disk utils wont necessary recover a corrupt fs and that the 
disk is not necessarily bad even though
everyone recommended I junk it.  My experience is that HDDs
  are pretty hardy devices and never had one fail
on some very old machines.  AAMOF, the only PC failure was on my new 
Gateway when the MB went out while
still in warranty.
My point in my original reply was to show you you were looking for the 
wrong file name and how you can help
yourself by judicious use of the aptitude search and also show 
commands.  For me, they are better than any gui
but the synaptic gui is pretty damn good if you use the correct key 
words when using the search command.
HTH
-- 
Leonard lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net
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