[COLUG] Is the drive dead or not?

[Paul Williams]

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 12:42 -0500, Kent Broestl wrote:
> After a very hard reboot (my son _kicked_ the computer), one of my 
> drives is now inaccessible. (Q: Head crash?)
> 
> mount /dev/hdf1 /storage
> /dev/hdf1 already mounted or /storage busy
> 
> lsof | grep storage gives me not much (only files mounted under /usr... 
> different drive)
> 
> ps aux doesn't tell me much either (only samba should hit the /storage 
> and that process is stopped)
> 
> During the boot process, I am also warned that the drive is already 
> mounted/busy.
> 
> I thought about fsck on the drive, but am warned that fsck on a mounted 
> partition is bad.
> Q: What am I missing?
> Q: How bad is it to fsck a mounted drive?
> Q: Is the drive just dead and should I just give up?
> 
> Any and all advice is welcome. Thanks!
> 
> Kent Broestl
> _______________________________________________
> colug432 mailing list colug432 at colug.net
> http://www.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug432
> 
Kent,

Step 1: Make sure your son doesn't get in any more fights with hard
drives :-P

Is this drive bootable, or does it only contain storage data? If it has
boot files, try booting from it, and send the output back.

If it doesn't have boot files, check out the latest live CD release of
GParted
( http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828&release_id=468078 ) and try booting from that.

Thanks,
Paul Williams (paul at smoothweb.net) | Jabber: pwill at jabber.org
Support Free Software: FSF | GNU | Ubuntu