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

[Joshua O'Leary]

On 14/07/12 23:25, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> Hello
> Thank you for the explanations. Please read below.
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Joshua O'Leary
> <joshua.oleary at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> Although gdm fails to load,
>>
> It doesn't really fail, though it takes forever. X can start but it is
> very, very slow. And after I enter the login credentials, I'm simply
> not waiting for it to finish - it takes too long.
>
>
>> can you still login to a tty, and start xorg the
>> traditional way by issuing the 'startx' command? You could also force a
>>
> Fortunately I can  login to a tty and thus obtain all the relevant
> logs. But there is no need to 'startx' (see above).
>
>
>> single fsck check on the next boot, by running touch /forcefsck. Also, it
>>
> I will try this tomorrow.
>
>
>> 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'.
>>
> I checked 'edit' in grub and it seems to me that the 'kernel
> (recovery)' option, or whatever it's called, and it contains 'ro
> single', so I guess I already tried it. But it doesn't help. So far my
> best option is to load the 'server' kernel which is already installed;
> then quickly enough I can get to a tty.
>
>
>> 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?
>>
> I am not sure what RAID is, so if I have it I didn't configure it
> intentionally. I only have a SATA hard drive, on which I have a
> logical /dev/sda3 partition which contains /dev/sda5 for /boot,
> /dev/sda6 for / (root) and /dev/sda8 for /home. I always use a single
> harddrive to boot.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
> Please see the output attached. Should I run a more in depth SMART
> test on the disks?
>
> Regards
> Liviu
>
>
"Should I run a more in depth SMART test on the disks?" This may be 
helpful in order to work out what area of the disk is actually causing 
the problem. Please could you also give the output of *sudo fdisk -l 
/dev/sda*, this would enable us to work out specifically which area of 
the disk is damaged by comparing it to the sector read errors.
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