sda1 corrupted and unmountable

[alexstz]

But it worked when i tryed fsck command in slax.

Wow! Everything in this topic was the same for me one-in-one. Slax worked for me too, I'so happy!

[rcrath]

kainbox's slax trick did it for me too, after hunting for a solution for 8 hrs. Thnx! Glad to have my sys back.

[th3fa7kid]

i have the same problem. tried everything everyone has suggested on any forum with no luck. slax did nothing for me. i have also tried re-installing ubuntu and it just sits on the initial screen for hours. can someone please help a n00b? im about to give up on ubuntu

[d-keig]

Are you sure the error messages are exactly the same? It's just when it happened to me, there were alot of posts about similer error messages but not exactly the same. Slightly different messages needed different methods of fixing the problem.

If it is exactly the same then:

Does booting into different kernel versions at boot (via the grub menu) give you the same result?

What does fsck tell you when running it with slax? Does it say there are any bad blocks?

edit: Just read your post with a bit more care. Are you able to boot into other OS's if you have any on the hard drive?

[pylover]

I have this problem also.

disk cheking is a reqular utility, it is verry bad if ubuntu cannot check a disk , & cannot stop automount .

[manuganji]

charlesA, I tried many of these solutions but they didn't work. Guess what, my hard drive failed! I think that's why none of them worked. That Dell guy is going to replace my hard disk today. Is there any information I need to retrieve from it so that some other person may not end up searching the solution in the wrong place?

[Jetro]

I'm having the same problem here, and am prepared to go to the "Slax" stage. But what is "Slax"? It seems to me a whole new Linux distro...

The case: Ubuntu wrongly shutting down, Windows working nicely, having the exact same error message (and outputs from suggested terminal commands) as original poster.

[Jetro]

BumpTM

To specify: sda1 is where Ubuntu is. The disk is not mounted or not even listed in "Places" when I boot from live USB.

fdisk -l /dev/sda
Cannot open /dev/sda

sudo e2fsck /dev/sda1
e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda1

sudo lsof /dev/sda1
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() tmpfs file system /cow
Output information may be incomplete.
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/ubuntu/.gvfs
Output information may be incomplete.

mount
aufs on / type aufs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
/dev/sdb1 on /cdrom type vfat (ro,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/loop0 on /rofs type squashfs (ro,noatime)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/ubuntu/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=ubuntu)
/dev/sdb2 on /media/CD75-D5CA type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=999,gid=999,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush)

sudo fsck -fC /dev/sda1
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
fsck: fsck.ntfs: not found
fsck: Error 2 while executing fsck.ntfs for /dev/sda1

I'll start another thread... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...1#post10145991

[bosozokujin]

I was wondering how you used slax to solve this problem? as I dont know how to go about the process. Thanks

[vmenkov]

I was wondering how you used slax to solve this problem? as I dont know how to go about the process. Thanks

The suggestion was to download another version of UNIX (called Slax) from http://www.slax.org/ , burn a CD (or prepare a USB device), and boot from that, instead of Ubuntu live CD. Supposedly it won't have the problem that Ubuntu live CD has, namely, trying to auto-mount the now-unmountable partition (sda1), failing, and just sitting there, in the process keeping sda1 "busy" and not accessible to e2fsck.

I wanted to try that, but could not burn a good CD (i.e., one, booting from which would be fully successful without I/O errors), presumably because the CD writer I was using wasn't good enough for the "troubled" computer's CD drive to fully read.

I wondered if I could just change the startup options for Ubuntu live CD (this is how: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions ) to tell Ubuntu, "please, don't touch /sda1 for now!" But adding options such as "sda=noprobe" (or should it have been "sda1=noprobe"?) to the boot command line seemed to have no effect whatsoever.

So I ended up using the alternative solution described at http://sanjayak71.blogspot.com/2010/...tion-from.html : basically, copying the entire /dev/sda1 to a huge disk file on another hard drive using the "dd" command, then running e2fsck on that file, and finally copying the "fixed" file back /dev/sda1 with "dd":

  #-- mount my other (good) hard disk drive
  sudo mkdir /mnt/b
  sudo mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/b
  #-- copy 
  sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/b/sda1.img
  #-- fix
  sudo e2fsck -y /mnt/b/sda1.img
  #-- once e2fsck completes successfully, move the data back
  sudo dd if=/mnt/b/sda1.img of=/dev/sda1

Even before moving the data back (the second "dd") one could temporarily mount the "fixed" file as a "loop mount" filesystem:

  sudo mkdir /mnt/loopa
  sudo mount -o loop /mnt/b/sda1.img /mnt/loopa

in order to verify that the "fixed" file system would indeed have your files as you know them. (I would, however, undo this temporary mounting (with "sudo umount /mnt/loopa") before doing the second "dd", to ensure I am not trying to copy a file system in an inconsistent state.

In Sanjay's post referred to above, he was, I think, using an external USB device instead of a second hard drive. But that wasn't an option for me, since all my external USB devices happened to be formatted with vfat, and could not create a fiel bigger than 4 GB.

In any event, this was a rather inefficient way for solving the problem (as compared to running e2fsck directly on the affected drive, if you could make it run!), since the rate of data transfer between drives with "dd" was under 0.5 gigabyte per minute on my machine, and for an entire partition that totals up to quite a bit of wait. But at least it worked.