MEPIS disappeared without a word
Posts: 53
This scared me. In 10 years window$ I haven´t seen this.
What happened? I messed xorg.conf up a little, couldn´t restart so
I used the Live Cd to boot and to edit xorg.conf (some wrong lines in $Display)
Repeated that twice because the result were not satisfying.
On the 3rd time i finally finished the editing of xorg.conf (remember: still with the live cd)
and i didnt want to log out and restart again, so i just reseted my computer (soft reset by pressing the reset button).
That broke Mepis´ neck or better to it´s partition. On the next boot Grub came out with an error..(maybe Error 51. but i cannot remember it anymore.) and i couldn´t start. I used the Live-CD and discovered that the linux partition where Mepis resides is broken, wiped out, whatever. (SUPERBLOCK CORRUPTED). Not readable, Finito. No access to fstab or to anything else.
If this gonna happen after 1-2-3 years of using Linux Mepis and all my data disappears like that, I think
i will go back to pure DOS and stay there, it is safer.
What happened here?`And is there a way to fix it (google says there is no chance, the partition info was deleted or something)? I left it untouched (maybe i find a solution) but I quite sure that I have to do a reinstallation.
LinuxWorld
The mistake you made can be avoided
Posts: 959
According to the information you provided in your post, you edited the contents of a mounted drive and without first dismounting it, your "soft" restart did nothing short of pulling the plug, which does not allow a drive to flush (or sync) the recent changes and can result in the drive or partition being flagged as "dirty"
I have always considered a soft restart to be a shut down using normal procedures using the restart option. Hitting reset can not ever be truly classed as "soft" when a system is fully functioning, so it might be wise to associate the reset button with "hot restart" to alert you to the real danger of the button and not to see it as a safe option.
The soft restart you did was basically no different to pulling the plug on an active and working drive, and having worked with computers for the last 11 years, and fixing them for the last 6, no system is fully resistant to "sudden power outages" of this type, even though most survive it the majority of the time. I guess you were just unlucky.
If you want a quick exit from Linux, try using a key sequence.
Dropping to a terminal with Crtl + Alt + F1 and use the keyboard Alt + Prntscn sequence as below, each time holding down the Alt + Prntscn keys and pressing the corresponding letters.
Alt + Prntscn + r, then s, then e then i then u then b
This takes only 10 seconds, or you could unmount the mounted drives then hit reset. I know this doesn't help you to get you data back, but I am thinking of others that will stumble upon this post and benefit from our failures. I too learnt the hard way.
Mike P
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Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis
superblock corrupted
Posts: 4864
you need to know where to look for the alternate superblocks on this partition so that you can run e2fsck -b 8193/16384/32768
i'd suggest
e2fsck -b 32768
for starters
as that goes with 4kb block size
you have to run this from the live cd
or another way which doesn't involve mounting the disk to get linux started