Hello,
I had installed a 250 GB SATA drive in my system using a PCI to SATA card. It had 3 partitions. One small primary partition with NTFS and the remaining extended partition with 2 equal and large ext3 logical partitions. Suddenly one day I got ext3 errors while booting and the 2 ext3 partitions would not mount. Both had bad superblocks. One partition with important data could be recovered using e2fsck but the other had a very bad superblock so I finally formatted it again with ext3. The primary NTFS partition was ok all the time. What are the possible causes for this sudden busting of superblocks? The bad blocks check did not reveal any bad blocks so that part was ok.
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:15 PM, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
Suddenly one day I got ext3 errors while booting and the 2 ext3 partitions would not mount. Both had bad superblocks. One partition with important data could be recovered using e2fsck but the other had a very bad superblock so I finally formatted it again with ext3. The primary NTFS partition was ok all the time. What are the possible causes for this sudden busting of superblocks? The bad blocks check did not reveal any bad blocks so that part was ok.
What make and model of hard drive? Sometimes some series are faulty--
dealers know about this and have to replace/recall such items
Could also be a faulty power supply--output should be within +- 5% of rating. (intex power supplies though getting cheaper are also lowering the quality) OR the pci card may have become loose leading to voltage/current fluctuation and therefore to data corruption OR the connectors may be loose leading to inconsistency/corruption of the superblocks OR a virus entered from the windows partition while windows was booted OR a bug in the kernel used if a developmental model kernel OR a hardware problem randomly occuring due to kinks in the electric supply
I thought the new linuxes were now using the more modern and better ext4 FileSystems.
Maybe a checklist to eliminate the causes one by one.
My 2 cents. Kussh
Kussh Singh wrote:
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:15 PM, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
Suddenly one day I got ext3 errors while booting and the 2 ext3 partitions would not mount. Both had bad superblocks. One partition with important data could be recovered using e2fsck but the other had a very bad superblock so I finally formatted it again with ext3. The primary NTFS partition was ok all the time. What are the possible causes for this sudden busting of superblocks? The bad blocks check did not reveal any bad blocks so that part was ok.
What make and model of hard drive? Sometimes some series are faulty--
dealers know about this and have to replace/recall such items
Mostly in faulty drives the first partition is the one that generally goes bust.
Could also be a faulty power supply--output should be within +- 5% of rating. (intex power supplies though getting cheaper are also lowering the quality) OR the pci card may have become loose leading to voltage/current fluctuation and therefore to data corruption OR the connectors may be loose leading to inconsistency/corruption of the superblocks
I suspected the pci card but it was ok. Now it is another one anyway. Cables are new.
OR a virus entered from the windows partition while windows was booted OR
Windows cannot recognize ext3 partitions, though I must add it does see the partition as some unknown one.
a bug in the kernel used if a developmental model kernel OR a hardware problem randomly occuring due to kinks in the electric supply
PSU may be suspect as it is now 7 years old but otherwise the system is working fine. Only my 17" CRT monitor is going disco ;-) every time I put it on. It keeps changing different colours, goes blank, negative, and after a warmup its ok. I have not had the time to call my monitor guy.
I thought the new linuxes were now using the more modern and better ext4 FileSystems.
Hmm.
Maybe a checklist to eliminate the causes one by one.
Thanks for your inputs. I hope I don't get this problem again.
-
Kussh Singh -
Rony