Hard disk crash once again – yippie!

No important things lost this time.. I have no idea why this happens so often lately. I know that some geeks are reading this, so for those interested how it happened and how I fixed it (or “How a disk crash fixed my heat fan”): I was just working on my “laptop called Weasel” when the electricity went off – that happens here every now and then. Because my battery is broken Weasel switched off immediatly as well. When I booted back up, I got into X and KDE, when suddenly no applications would start. I switched to the text console and could not log in. Ext3 aborts were running over the screen. Very weird.. I booted with a Knoppix CD and checked the hard disk. All partitions (data, another linux installation) apart from my system partition were OK. Phew, I thought. The broken partition lost its superblock and obviously all its superblock backups – “fsck.ext3 -b xxxxx /dev/hda1” failed. So I went for the sledge hammer method that I read about and just created a new superblock with “mkfs.ext2 -S /dev/hda1” (don’t try this at home kids). Now I could at least start fsck on the partition. Well, obviously everything on that drive is garbage now. Fsck is running since 10 min now and currently iteration over /lost+found because of unattached inodes again and again. Yuck. I only hope for a few pictures that are on that partition to appear back again. I have no idea how the filesystem on hda1 could be so messed up from just one power outage. The good thing is that the CPU got so hot now that Weasel’s heat fan switched to its second speed level, which never happened before – I didn’t know little Weasel is capable of making so much noise! The higher voltage on the fan engine unblocked the fan with a little rattle. Some dirt (or a fly as Jaromil’s laptop trapped recently) jammed my fan a while ago and I never got around to open the thing and have a look. So, now the fan works again and the file check is still running, “fixing” my lost+found. Now, where was my Debian net-install CD?

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