[xubuntu-users] harddisk failure, or Xubuntu refuses to load

[Joshua O'Leary]

On 14/07/12 19:48, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> Dear all
> I'm in a bind as Xubuntu refuses to boot up and I'm unable to pinpoint
> the cause.
>
> Here's what happened:
> My Asus laptop was working on the table under Xubuntu Lucid when I
> grabbed it as usual with one hand from below. Then I noticed that it
> froze as, I assume, I touched (somewhere somehow and too much) the
> harddrive. As it had frozen, I then powered it off by holding pressed
> for 5sec the 'power on' button. When starting it again, it
> automatically launches harddrive checks then throws up a myriad of
> error messages on the virtual consoles.
>
> To attempt to diagnose, I booted up on a LiveCD and checked my 3 Linux
> partitions using e2fsck and GParted. In both cases the ext2/ext3
> partitions turned out as 'clean'. Mounting the drives and accessing
> the folder structure and individual files works fine, according to
> limited testing. (Booting Windows Vista on the other side of the
> computer works fine, too.) However, when I try to boot up Linux _from_
> the disk, Ubuntu still automatically launches harddrive checks, throws
> up a error messages on the virtual consoles and is unusably slow. I am
> attaching a log of 'dmesg' [1]. Essentially the following error
> message gets repeated again and again:touch /forcefsck
> [ 1371.730197] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
> [ 1371.730205] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
> [ 1371.730211] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
> [ 1371.730225] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:00:1d:e6:f5/00:00:0b:00:00/40 tag 0
> ncq 4096 in
> [ 1371.730227]          res 41/40:08:1e:e6:f5/00:00:0b:00:00/00 Emask
> 0x409 (media error) <F>
> [ 1371.730234] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
> [ 1371.730239] ata1.00: error: { UNC }
> [ 1371.734703] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
> [ 1371.734720] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
> [ 1371.734725] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [ 1371.734733] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
> [ 1371.734743] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
> [ 1371.734748]         72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
> [ 1371.734770]         0b f5 e6 1e
> [ 1371.734779] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error -
> auto reallocate failed
> [ 1371.734789] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 0b f5 e6 1d 00 00 08 00
> [ 1371.734809] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 200664606
> [ 1371.734831] ata1: EH complete
> touch /forcefsck
> So what's going on? My best (and hopeful) guess is that although the
> harddisk and file systems are fine along with most of the underlying
> data, when grabbing the laptop the OS was accessing/modifying several
> files in particular got somehow corrupted and are now impeding a
> proper power up of the system. (Although I could get onto the console
> and to the GDM login screen, trying to log into X using any user name
> takes an eternity and never completes.)
>
> Could anyone suggest how to tackle this? Should I attempt to reinstall
> Xubuntu? (I have /home and /boot on separate partitions.) Anything
> else?
>
> Regards
> Liviu
>
> [1] http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=93465134138264110255
>
>
Hi,
Although gdm fails to load, can you still login to a tty, and start xorg 
the traditional way by issuing the 'startx' command? You could also 
force a single fsck check on the next boot, by running *touch 
/forcefsck*. Also, it would be worth seeing if booting into single user 
mode is any faster - add the 'single' option at the end of grub's boot 
command line, after 'quite splash'. Your log also seems to mention that 
you have hard disks in a raid array - "raid6: sse2x4    3968 MB/s" - if 
so, does the system boot up properly if you use just one hard disk? 
Giving the output of *smartctl --all /dev/sda* may also be useful, to 
examine the state of your hard drive, although it does rely on the 
smartmontools package being installed.

Joshua



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