On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 07:03, civileme wrote:
> On Sunday 22 July 2001 04:00, Marcia L Waller wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > I have had LM8 installed and running for awhile and tonight my screen
> > went black so I rebooted and got a very unwelcome message during boot
> > up-Primary master hard disk fail. I was sure I had made a boot disk when
> > installing LM8 but now of course I cannot find it. I am freaking. I have
> > no idea what I can do. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have 2 hard
> > disks. The larger disk which has about 5 gigs is the one in trouble. Any
> > help will be greatly appreciated. Also, I only have Linux on this
> > machine.I tried rescuing from the CDrom but I do not know how to use the
> > rescue.
> > Sincerely,
> > Marcia
>
> Dear Marcia,
>
> I am very sorry to hear that. A "primary Master hard disk fail" is not a
> message from the linux kernel.
>
> It is from your BIOS.
>
> Check all cables, remove and reseat them, cool the disk if you have cooling
> spray, then boot and backup as fast as you can. You have a catastrophic
> hardware failure.
>
> THe method of using your CD for rescue is to hit F1 then type "rescue"
> without the quotes. It gives you a simple shell in root mode. You can
>
> fdisk -l /dev/hda
>
> But if it complains, don't be surprised. The heads have crashed on the
> surface of the platters, or the bearings are gone, or the platters are off
> spindle or the on-board electronics have failed. In the last case, you
> might get a window of a few minutes at a time with the spray frost TV
> repairmen use, but that is a long shot. Possibly a cable has worked partly
> loose or the power supply is not well-connected... Which is why I say check
> cables.
>
> Civileme
In other words, BACK UP WHAT YOU CAN -- RIGHT NOW! Otherwise, you could
easily lose all your data. I had this problem once. I only managed to back up
about half my stuff before the drive died :-(
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
