hello,

I have a hard drive that failed it was not my primary drive but a secondary drive that was used for backups on the server. The problem is is that we had to reboot the server and now the server will not load.

We have completely disconnected the drive from the system but it will not load. I think it is because in the /etc/fstab file loads information for the drive. The problem is we can not edit it. I can not access pico to edit the file because it then drops me into shell. When booting it says that there is and error in hda, possibly something bad in the superblock. Can anyone help?

The other thing that I can think of that might be causing it is the "/" -- main partition appears to be full, but I can't get into it to remove anything from it. Any suggestions (honest ones that will help me)?

Thanks

Mount the drive in another server to fix it.

When booting it says that there is and error in hda, possibly something bad in the superblock.
hda is usually your primary IDE drive, so you may have other problems. Have you tried booting in single user mode? If your root partition is full you may need to boot from a floppy then mount that partition so that you can delete files off of it.

Richard

I was able to get it fixed.

hda is actually a secondary drive because this system uses scsi as it's primary drives.

What I did is use a linux boot disk to load linux and the original cd for rh 7.2 and when into the fix drive (don't remeber the exact name but it was "F5" for the help) it attached it to a temp system that allowed me to pico /etc/fstab file. After that all worked well.

To clarify the situation the backup drive did not fail. One of our ex-tech's was supposed to mount the drive as backup, instead he created a folder named backup on the / partition; which is why the / partition got full. He then edited the /etc/fstab file and did not do it correctly, which created this big error after rebooting the system. Which we had to reboot the system because the / partition was full and was making the server inoperable. Kind of a catch 22, but luckily all is working well again.

Ouch.

I see why he is an "ex-tech" :D Glad to see you got it sorted out.

Richard

a tech shoudlnt make mistakes like that....

Aye thats true

Originally posted by ninji
a tech shoudlnt make mistakes like that....

Like I said previously said, ex-tech. It is mistakes like this that can kill a company, that is why he is an ex-tech. Luckily it wasn't on a server hosting consumers, but it was hosting our companies website. It is the second closest to good that I can pull from this situation, aside from it now working again (1st good thing). :)