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

[Liviu Andronic]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Joshua O'Leary
<joshua.oleary at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Giving the output of sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda would be very helpful, to find
> out which area of the hard disk is damaged/faulty/corrupted. That way, we
> can compare it to the error, and find out what is actually affected. Running
>
As far as I can tell the (obvious) error seems to be located on the
/dev/sda6 (root) partition. To get sizes in sectors instead of
cylinders, I used:
fdisk -lu /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd9b3496e

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    30717951    15357952   1c  Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2   *    30717952   186996599    78139324    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3       186996661   614695094   213849217    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5       186996663   187607069      305203+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6       187607133   240862544    26627706   83  Linux
/dev/sda7       240862608   252124109     5630751   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8       293089923   614695094   160802586   83  Linux
/dev/sda9       252124173   253152269      514048+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order


> badblocks on the drive may also see if there are any other problems. When
>
Good idea. I forgot about this command.


> you run xfce4-notes from terminal, what does it output? You could try
>
Nothing, really. I tried a gdb debug but since I have no symbols, I
didn't bother to pursue.


> resetting xfce (rm -rf ~/.config/xfce4), which may lose some settings but
> remove any problematic config files.
>
I accessed via a file editor the Notes related files in
~/.config/xfce4 and it went fine. So I assume the issue is not there.
Perhaps the 'xfce4-notes' binary itself got corrupted. In any case,
the Notes panel plugin loads and works fine, so I am not sure there's
reason to investigate this.

Regards
Liviu