Denis,
> dmsg shows Ext-3 fs error (stb1); remounting file system read only
This is a pretty clear indication that either your drive is dying or you
did something very bad to your filesystem (many hard reboots,
accidential writes to the raw disk device, etc). I'm thinking the most
likely is that your drive is dying, since EXT3 is pretty good about
recovering from hard reboots.
To help verify this, check through your dmesg/kernel logs for more
drive failure information. For instance, the Linux kernel typically
prints out something similar to the following when there are signs of
hardware failures:
hdd: set_multmode: status=0x61 { DriveReady DeviceFault Error }
hdd: set_multmode: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hdd: recal_intr: status=0x61 { DriveReady DeviceFault Error }
hdd: recal_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide1: reset: success
If you see these, then surely the kernel is having trouble with the
hardware. The two main explanations are either that the drive is flat
out going bad and is returning CRC errors on sector reads, OR your
cabling is bad and there are CRC errors in messages between the drive
and the controller. (I'm sure there are other possible explanations,
but I know how to check for these two fairly common issues easily.)
To get more information about such errors, i suggest you use smartctl
(a part of the smartmontools package on Debian) on the drive. For
instance, on my drive I get:
# smartctl -a /dev/sda
<... snip ...>
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 105 099 006 Pre-fail Always
- 7497130
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 097 097 000 Pre-fail Always
- 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always
- 427
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always
- 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 075 060 030 Pre-fail Always
- 41336965
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 093 093 000 Old_age Always
- 6663
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always
- 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always
- 419
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 061 051 045 Old_age Always
- 39 (Lifetime Min/Max 21/39)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 039 049 000 Old_age Always
- 39 (0 14 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 079 057 000 Old_age Always
- 85764379
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline
- 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always
- 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline
- 0
202 TA_Increase_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always
- 0
<... /snip ...>
Each drive will output slightly different values. I don't konw what
many of these mean, and on my drive, there's a lot of questionably high
values... However, the two that are most important in my output are
Reallocated_Sector_Ct and UDMA_CRC_Error_Count. Anything above 0 in the
former may be indicative of a drive being on it's last legs (according
to a Google research paper). If you have a large number of UDMA CRC
errors, that may be indicative of a bad cable. Other errors may be
useful if you do the research on them.
For smartctl and possibly for reading your kernel logs, you will need to
have root privileges.
> The drive shows one locked folder (lost+found), but it has a modified date of
> 19June2008. I have been unable to look inside.
>
> Is lost+found where the error/recovery resides?
> Is this a warning that the drive may give up the ghost real soon now?
The lost+found folder is where orphaned files are placed after a fsck.
Orphaned files are those which were not deleted normally, but were
unlinked from their parent directory... in other words, files still on
disk but were forgotten about. You should look through these files to
see if anything of importance is there. Commonly they'll just be
temporary files (perhaps generated by firefox and the like). I
encourage you to use the "file" command on them to determine the file
content type, then use an appropriate tool to open the ones you can.
Note that you must have root privileges to look at files in this
directory.
Good luck,
tim
_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
