broken boot partition. how to replace it?

saibaggins · #1 14th September 2005, 11:53 AM

Couple of days ago I had a HD blowout. It was caused by broken IDE pins.
After a day soldeing them back together, the drive seems to work. It boots grub, but halts on loading the kernal. Diagnositcs with knoppix showed that the kernel file, (and someother files in /boot) are broken (get and IO error trying to cp them, though they do cp).

how do I make a new /boot ?
could I just copy one from the CD? how does it know where to look for root? it there a config for that?

anyone done this?

tashirosgt · #2 14th September 2005, 02:39 PM

What does your /etc/fstab look liike?

saibaggins · #3 14th September 2005, 03:12 PM

i cant get in there right now, but in any case it doesn't get as far as mounting the drive.
GRUB cant actually load the kernel.

saibaggins · #4 14th September 2005, 09:41 PM

noone know how to make a new boot partition?

tashirosgt · #5 15th September 2005, 03:13 PM

Can you use the first Fedora install cd to boot in the rescue mode? If you can mount some of your old file system, you might be able to get to /etc/fstab.

tbl · #6 15th September 2005, 03:34 PM

well, if you can boot with a life cd, and then create the both /root and /boot from the broken hdd to another one, it could work ... but this is a goooood work :-p
I mad this few days ago because the hd from a server was seak ...

saibaggins · #7 17th September 2005, 10:07 AM

it's a sad story, about a valiant effot that didnt work...

I'd replace some of the pin connections to the hdd board with solder, and I could see the data on root (with some corruption on /boot). It wasnt stable as the solder kept comming off, so I decided to replace the entire Ide connector. Having solderd it all down with all pin connections seeming to work, the drive no longer detects in bios. It a flat line..I might have a nother shot at it, but Im rapidly loosing hope of saving the drive.

One thing that might work is buying another spinpoint 1614N and changing the board for the new one. The discs will be identical, so it should work. Once I get the drive physically working theres still the problem of getting the data back, but I should be a new system by then, so just a case of grabbing of the essential stuff.

tashiro sgt>
i dont think there was anything unusual in the fstab. How do you see it affecting this problem?

tashirosgt · #8 17th September 2005, 02:39 PM

If you had /boot as a separate partition and some space on the drive, you could make a new /boot partition elsewhere on it. The /boot directory is usually small. You don't need /boot on the dying drive to salvage data from the drive if you boot from something else.

Is this a hd for a desktop or a portable? No many people could handle the soldering of surface mount connectors on an IDE connector. Did you test each connection for continuity and for shorts?

saibaggins · #9 20th October 2005, 11:20 AM

Well its been a long time since I posted. After the drive broke, there was a fire in my house and had it not been for a handy hose pipe I'd have lost everything. As it turned out my pc was smoke damaged so I was able to get lots of new kit thanks to the insurance. new drive, AMD64, nv chipset

I'm happy to say that I managed to successfully solder a new ide connector onto the back of the drive. It was a nightmare, and at one stage I thought I had done it and all the conections were good, but when I tried it the drive was dead. Still after a month off I got some renewed inspiration and tracked down a dodgy conection. Keeping the conections sound (and none shorting) was not easy, once a conection came loose after the system had booted, creating a lockup.
Eventually though I've got it running stabley.

I bought another samsung sp1614n as a replacement, but if the original one stays stable I might consider trying a RAID configuration at some point. can't be much danger in setting it as a mirror anyway.

about the boot partition: it doesnt really matter now as Ive installed FC4 on the new drive. I understand about making a new /boot partition, but where would I have gotten the contents? the old one was corrupt.

thank your you posts, and sorry leaving this thread dangling for so long.