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Prasad wrote- I am running Linux 1.3.4 with a 1GB SCSI drive on an Adaptec controller. The SCSI drive is the root and complete file system of Linux. (There is also another 850MB IDE drive which is the C: drive of DOS/Windows) I was doing an innocuous find . -name foo -print, which gave me some warnings about bad directory blocks (sorry, do not remember exact error msg) - I proceeded to try to remove the files in the offending directory and the system just hung with a bunch of ext2-fs error msgs. When I rebooted from a backup floppy, the boot and hardware checks went ok - Linux 1.3.4 loaded ok from the disk but I got this error - EXT2-fs error (device 8/1): ext2_check_descriptors: Inode bitmap for group 20 not in group (block 131079)! EXT2-fs group descriptors corrupted. MSDOS Beta 0.6 (compatibility level 0.4, fast msdos) Mounting root VFS: Mounted root (umsdos filesystem) readonly The system hangs there. This seems like a disk block failure. I have lost a lot of work on this disk (I was about to setup some backup, but at this point I have none). Please, please help me out if you can. I am even willing to pay for someone who might be willing to provide a solution. Prasad- I have seen this type of problem before. Either the disk has some bad blocks or the disk dosen`t spin up. How old is the disk in question? If the disk doesn`t spin up, the motor is gone so your hosed [spin up is a whirring sound followed by a click]? If it does spin up, it may be possible to get some of the files back. What I would recommend is attempting to recover the files and then doing a lowlevel reformat [this function is accessable from ^a on boot]. File recovery is tricky. It involves booting to a root fs on floppy and hand mounting the partitions. The files can then be copied to your DOS disk for backup. The reformat will find all bad sectors on the disk and remove references to these parts of the disk. I wouldn`t trust valuable data to this disk without backup though. Anyone- The Linux Journal has an ad for: BRU Backup Restore Utility. Has anyone tried it? Does anyone recommend anything else? Has anyone tried any on-line backup services via the Internet? Dan Demus dan at paragon.com (617)937-9800x242
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