[Techtalk] bad hard drive, or just filesystem?

Christine Bussman olearyck at geek-den.net
Mon Oct 8 14:59:18 UTC 2007


Before I get to my question, a little background on the system that might 
apply:

mythtv box
gentoo linux

Either the hard drive is bad on my mythbox, or else the file system has been 
corrupted.  How can I tell if something is physically wrong with the hard 
drive before I spend days reinstalling gentoo and mythtv?  Portage got eaten 
by the corruption, so I need something that I can run off of a boot disk.  I 
am leaning in the direction of the filesystem being corrupted because a few 
months ago my toddler was experimenting with the power and reset buttons on 
the mythbox.  I know he corrupted the database, but I thought I had it fixed.  
However, over the last few weeks the database keeps getting corrupted over 
and over again, and yesterday it was so bad that myisamchk would segfault.  
And then also yesterday I reemerged mysql in case that was the problem, and 
then a few hours later whenever I try to emerge anything I get 

Calculating dependencies -Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 6474, in ?
    retval = emerge_main()
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 6468, in emerge_main
    myopts, myaction, myfiles, spinner)
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 5770, in action_build
    mydepgraph = depgraph(settings, trees, myopts, myparams, spinner)
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 1130, in __init__
    vardb.aux_get(pkg, self._mydbapi_keys))))
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 904, in _aux_get_wrapper
    self._portdb.aux_get(pkg, self._portdb_keys)))
  File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 6230, in aux_get
    try:                                del self.auxdb[mylocation][mycpv]
  File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/cache/template.py", line 82, in __delitem__
    self._delitem(cpv)
  File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/cache/flat_hash.py", line 98, in _delitem
    raise cache_errors.CacheCorruption(cpv, e)
cache.cache_errors.CacheCorruption: dev-util/pkgconfig-0.21-r1 is corrupt: 
[Errno 5] Input/output 
error: '/var/cache/edb/dep/usr/portage/dev-util/pkgconfig-0.21-r1'

(sorry for the length, I don't know what if any part of it is important)

The only explanation I can come up with is that either the hard drive or the 
filesystem is bad.  How can I tell which?

Thanks.

Christine


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