[Techtalk] bad hard drive, or just filesystem?

MK Hayes mk_hayes at charter.net
Mon Oct 8 16:39:55 UTC 2007


Our Myth box went bad recently, and we determined it was the drive by
checking /var/log/messages. Ours was a Fedora box, and we did or
reinstall using MythDora. New build was up in a couple of hours and
things work now that we hadn't solved originally. (The remote was next
to useless for DVD playback but works perfectly now.) There was very
little fiddling to get the Myth part set up, and that was mostly related
to losing the old guide service and transferring to the new one. Since
we use this box as our general music server, we had to spend time moving
the music files over, and setting up NFS and Samba. 

There were so many improvements in the new build, we were actually glad
that the HD failed and forced us to rebuild.

MK


On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 09:59 -0500, Christine Bussman wrote:
> 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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