Hi all, Today I had to reset my computer once because my IDE cable might have become a little loose and thus linux stopped responding. After that linux won't boot. It gives error init not found. (The kernel is installed in a different partition.) So I tried using init=/bin/bash but to no avail. So now I turned to linux boot CD. but it won't even let me mount the partition. The error message just said incorrect parameters. After that I tried running fsck which resulted in error message something like Is it zero length partition? I also tried using ext2 file viewer in windows to copy some of the files in that partition but it simply hanged. So, if anybody knows any solution to at least let me restore the files please help. By the way a few of the restore utilities I have already tried but they too also hang the computer. One thing more how can linux be called best OS when a simple reset once makes its file system unusable ?

It is not Linux OS fault that you had a faulty cable connection. I would consider this. 1. Boot from CD with linux rescue 2. Let the program auto dectect linux partitions FAILED - GOTO 4 0.K - 2.1 chroot /mnt/sysimage 0.K - 2.2 fdisk (your HD) 0.K - 2.3 verify partitions are there and not corrupted FAILED - GOTO 4 3. Run fsck on partitions OK - 3.1 Verify data on 'PASSED' fs by mounting them 4. Come back with more information

Hi malkowich, Certainly it is not linux's fault that my cable was loose. But certainly you don't expect to a file system to fail on a single reset and fail so comprehensively that you are not even able even to recover one file from it let alone getting the OS up and running. The few things you have mentioned in your posting I have already done. For more information this is the output of fsck /dev/hdxy fsck.ext2:Attempt to read block from file system resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hdxy. Could this be a zero-length partition ? As you can see from the output file system is ext2. And please don't say that you should have converted to ext3. Thanks anyway, .jareeN.

this is not a time or place for finger pointing - as we don't have a solution yet and therein the cause of the problem it is a bit premature to come to conclusions of the magnitute of competence of an OS. I would need the result of what happend when you did an fdisk. if your partitions are corrupt, and GNU/Linux tried its best to keep the system up with a bad connection, who knows what got written on the HD and where. if fsck complains about a partitions being zero length, then probably that is what it is, a zero length partition - which happened when write operations where done on an unstable I/O bus. It would have been nice if you got a terminal message saying "your bus-cable is loose, fix it NOW!".

Hi mal, If I can you that way. I liked your reply esp the last part of the last para. My other partitions are not corrupt. fdisk (linux) reports no errors. It displays the partitions as if nothing has happened. The partition magic program shows as if the whole partition is filled up and there is no space left. But it does this with any partition that it can't understand. Every other progran in windows that tries to access that partition to recover any information makes the whole system go haywire. The mount command displays the error message invalid parameters even when I give the command mount /dev/hdxy /mnt/sysimage. Thanks, .jareeN.

I have heard that Partition Magic software understands ext2 partitions - may be you have an old version?. If files where written randomly, they could have gotten crosslinked, so if a utility tries to recover the file, based on info from the inode entries, it will get confused, as they are not stable and there is no duplicate to fall back to, so for example, a utilty might see only a single file taking up the whole partition.(just an example case, not specific to yours). Which partition is corrupt, home,usr,var,/,boot ?

Actually there were only two partitions /boot and /. The boot one is alright. And yes partition magic understands ext2 but this is the corrupted one. So are there any other solutions than formating ?