Apparently corrupted hard drive -- advice wanted
Hi Trisquelers, I would welcome some perspective and advice regarding an apparently corrupted hard drive.
Last Christmas I gave my brother a laptop from MiniFree, with Trisquel installed. Just days ago he told me he booted it and it went straight to a busybox console. Reading up on this, I understand that his boot partition is corrupted, and some flavor of fsck may fix it. (Or at least some partition is corrupted, but he said it comes up in a few seconds.)
But why would a hard drive be corrupted? With a journaling file system, it's hard to corrupt it through user activity. Might there be a hardware failure? If this is the case, trying to fix it would actually make it worse, if it writes incorrect data to the drive. Right? The laptop is "new" although of course it was manufactured by Lenovo many years ago. Is it odd for a drive to become corrupted? (It's a solid-state drive.)
He lives in another city, so I can't simply stop over and check things out in person.
I could possibly talk him through using a simple application of fsck, but if it's wise to copy data first, that would probably be too hard to manage.
What would you do?
Thanks,
-Jim
1. Create a bootable USB pendrive, flashing Trisquel Mini in it.
2. Boot from USB pendrive (you should press a special key while booting)
3. Mount internal drive from this "live" session and backup your data
4. Run "sudo fsck -kccy" on your internal drive
El 8/8/19 a les 3:05, name at domain ha escrit:
> Hi Trisquelers, I would welcome some perspective and advice regarding an
> apparently corrupted hard drive.
>
> Last Christmas I gave my brother a laptop from MiniFree, with Trisquel
> installed. Just days ago he told me he booted it and it went straight
> to a busybox console. Reading up on this, I understand that his boot
> partition is corrupted, and some flavor of fsck may fix it. (Or at
> least some partition is corrupted, but he said it comes up in a few
> seconds.)
>
> But why would a hard drive be corrupted? With a journaling file system,
> it's hard to corrupt it through user activity. Might there be a
> hardware failure? If this is the case, trying to fix it would actually
> make it worse, if it writes incorrect data to the drive. Right? The
> laptop is "new" although of course it was manufactured by Lenovo many
> years ago. Is it odd for a drive to become corrupted? (It's a
> solid-state drive.)
>
> He lives in another city, so I can't simply stop over and check things
> out in person.
>
> I could possibly talk him through using a simple application of fsck,
> but if it's wise to copy data first, that would probably be too hard to
> manage.
>
> What would you do?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Jim
>
Thanks. What does "-kccy" do?
On a related note, is it hard to make a bootable pen drive that has a writable (persistent) partition? I found this:
https://theartofmachinery.com/2016/04/21/partitioned_live_usb.html
and it worked for a "systemrescuecd" iso but Trisquel mini didn't successfully boot. Any thoughts?
Have you reach out to Minifree? By buying from them you get the advantage of tech support and warranty.
That's a thought. I sent an e-mail asking if there is anything I should generally know (about booting process, partition plan) but didn't formally ask for support. Maybe I will. Thanks.