> I had a hard drive crash recently and was able to get
> a replacement since it was under warranty. I believe
> I need to partition the drive but am running into
> problems.
> Hard Drive: WDC AC31000H (Western Digital Caviar)
> Connection: Primary IDE slave
> Device: /dev/hdb1
> Error:
> [/sbin/fsck.ext2] fsck.ext2 -a /dev/hdb1
> fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in
> short read while trying to open /dev/hdb1
> Could this be a zero-length partition?
> Upon seeing this error, I tried to run "fdisk /dev/hdb1" but
You should just run fdisk /dev/hdb. I've made this mistake before.
You'll get errors trying to fdisk a partition rather than a disk!
Quote:> that results in the error "Unable to read /dev/hdb1".
> I ran "mount" and saw that /dev/hdb1 was already mounted on
> /home/development as read/write. So I attempted to
> "umount /home/development" but this failed because the filesystem
> was mounted read only! I have the full set of docs under /usr/doc/HOW-TO
> but all the how-to's are gzipped and I can't gunzip them because
> the file system is read only.
> What I am looking for is some steps I can take to get this new
> hard drive up and mounted properly. I have a back up tape just waiting
> to be reloaded.
I had a similar problem, but don't know if it was the same. Basically,
this is what happened. I got a new machine, and was transfering my
linux system the literal way: by yanking the disk out of the old
machine, and intalling it in the new one. It also was a 1-gig WDC. I
put it in the new machine as /dev/hdb and got similar error messages. I
wish I wrote them down, but I can't remember it quite right. Both
during boot up (note, I had the jumpers set up right, and the correctly
rdev-ed boot floppy) and during trying fdisk from the Slackware
boot/root floppies, I got a some reading error message repeatly (about a
dozen times or so) before it gave up trying to read from the disk. Just
for fun, I tried the DOS fdisk twice. Once it didn't recognize it at
all, and the second time it sort of recognized it (i.e. at least there
was menu option to change to another drive) but once I changed, it could
read nothing about the disk. Great, I thought, I trashed the disk while
moving it (it was a tight fit trying to slide it into the 3.5" drive
bay, I had to really push on it to get it in). So I put it back in the
old machine, and it worked great (as /dev/hdb for that matter). As a
last resort, I installed in on the new machine as /dev/hdd on ide1 (the
CD-ROM was on /dev/hdc). And lo and behold, it worked great. I have no
idea why this solved my problem, but it did, and I haven't messed with
it since!
Either it is something peculiar to the motherboad/bios/ide controller,
or else maybe there was something wrong in the ribbon connector. What I
thought was interseting was that during booting via floppy, it
recognized the disk (i.e. I got a line to the effect of "hard disk 1,
WDCAC31000H 1024 KB blah blah...") during its semi-plug-and-play routine
at the beginning of the boot sequence, and it didn't panic until it came
time to reading the partitions. BTW, the machine is a Gatewaty G6-180
(180 PP) with 32 MB RAM, with a 2.5 WDC on /dev/hda and a Toshiba CD-ROM
on /dev/hdc. Of course, Gateway couldn't be bothered to provide any
information about the motherboard, except how to install more RAM, etc.
So:
1) Unless your problem is something other than a /dev/hdb vs. /dev/hdb1
type thing (as it was when you ran fdisk), try installing it on /dev/hdd
instead.
2) Anybody know why I might have had these problems?
Jon Sundquist
by