The past few days have been interesting, as they were spent rewiring the house so that the new UPS that we installed for the house would work and not have too much load on it. In addition we redistributed the load so that each of the three phases coming into the house from the electricity board have an equal amount of load on them. This involved cutting a lot of wires, some drilling and a lot of splicing and adding of new fuses etc.
We finally got the delivery for the new UPS 3 days ago but the batteries that were supposed to be delivered at the same time were only delivered yesterday as they took longer than expected to charge (That’s what the dealer told us). When the UPS arrived we had to remove the old Inverter ’cause of the deal we had made with the company (we got a discount if we gave them our old inverter) so we didn’t have any power backup for the house till yesterday night when all the work was finally done.
Thanks to all of this, my desktop was off for most of the past three days. I didn’t want to chance the power going off and my UPS (for the computer) running out of juice before it came back.
Once everything was installed and tested I booted up my system and got a Grub Rescue prompt instead of my normal boot screen. Normally the solution to this is booting up with a live CD and reinstalling Grub. But first I had to figure out what happened and why I was getting this error. I still don’t know what happened but I ‘think’ that the drive developed a bad sector/block and that sort of destroyed the bootloader.
The problem I faced then was that my DVD drive seemed to be having a lot of trouble reading any of the Live CD’s I have lying around. I first tried the Debian Testing Installation cd, followed by RHEL 5.1, Slackware, Kanotix, Kanoppix. None of them would work. Finally managed to boot using the Debian Test and convinced it to read from the CD. Once that was done told it to restore the Bootloader and was good to go.
But since I didn’t know what caused the crash I wanted to make sure that my Main drive was working ok (Its a 1 TB Segate) so I booted into single user and told the system to scan the 1st 500GB partition for badblocks and mark them as such. This scan took about 14 hours. Now I have another 500GB partition plus a 200GB drive and another 15 GB drive. Which by my guess will take the most of the next few days to scan. The 20 GB shouldn’t be an issue as I can scan it while booted in the GUI (Its a backup drive) but the rest have data on them that is used when I boot into Linux so I will have to do it from a single user mode.
I think I will copy most of my work/entertainment files to a thumb drive and work off that till this is done.
Well this is all for now. I am off to copy data to my thumb drive and then will start the scan on the other partitions. Will post more later.
– Suramya