On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Yes, I'm sure it's fine now. Please clarify, what do you think is fine now ? The drive ? Or the laptop/drive controller ? Looks to me like some pages went bad, and the > drive mapped them out and replaced with some spare pages held in reserve. > Unfortunately, the bad pages were mapped to the initial sectors that held > the partition table and the bootloader. OK. > The partition table is stored only in one place. There's no backup copy of > it. Looking forward, should one be backing up the PT ? Would that have helped in this situation ? I suppose that it's theoretically possible to scan the sectors looking > for something that looks like the start of an ext4 partition. It'll probably > be on sector 63 or 2048, and from the ext4 superblock figure out the > partition's size, then past it scan for the next partition's ext4 > superblock, and be able to reconstruct the partition table that way. But I > don't know of any tool that would do that. OK. Can anyone else chime in on this idea ? > In this respect, I say that SSDs are no better than mechnical drives. I think I agree with you now ! For > peace of mind, nothing beats a pair of RAID-1 drives. One drive goes bad – > it's easy to swap it out without losing any data. I ordered a laptop to replace my old one last week. It has an eSATA port... and hard drives are inexpensive these days... This whole experience has been a huge eye opener. > Plus, when you have one of those once-in-a-biennial events like the old > 100mb for /boot not being big enough any more, or grub growing too fat to > fit within the first 63 sectors, with RAID-1 you'll be able to sweat it out, > and survive, without having to wipe everything and fresh-install from > scratch. Right. I need to put more effort into data backup, though, to my credit, I do have regular backups and ironically, doing a backup showed me how bad the problem was AND allowed me to get 69 of 70 GB of data off the drive before it failed entirely. The first sign of this problem was a very suspicious boot failure. I immediately performed a backup upon experiencing that, wherein I found out how bad it really was. Though my old laptop has had boot issues with Linux kernels for a long, long time. > > -- > users mailing list > users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe or change subscription options: > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users > Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org > -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
