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

[Ryan Gauger]

Hello. This once happened to my dad. An expert came to look at his
computer, and it was a hard drive failure. I suppose this is most-likely
the issue you have, unless you have Windows Vista installed on the same
hard drive. Then, it would definitely not be a hard drive failure. To make
sure, I would try re-installing Xubuntu, or try to figure out if this is a
boot loader issue. If this is a problem or error with the boot loader, this
can probably be fixed by just re-installing GRUB (or whatever boot loader
you have). I hope this helps!

---Ryan


 *From:* Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com>
*Sent:* Saturday, July 14, 2012 1:49:34 PM
*To:* Xubuntu Help and User Discussions <xubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
*Subject:* [xubuntu-users] harddisk failure, or Xubuntu refuses to load

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:
[ 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

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


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