Catestrophic failure

[Matthew Carpenter]

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Box Details:
Dell Latitude C640, 2.3GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and 80GB drive.
SuSE 9.2 Professional with many bells and whistles as supplied by SuSE.

This morning I can into work where I leave this guy running, and the
machine is nonresponsive and the hard drive light is on solid.
I can ping it, but SSH to it hangs for as long as I leave it.

Hard power down.  Booting up causes kernel panic, cannot mount root
partition.
I boot to a SuSE 9.1 install still hanging around on the box and fdisk
the 9.2 root partition.  After having immense number of repairs (as in
"fdisk -y") I find roughly 100MB in /lost+found, some looking like
Python, some like fonts, and a whole bunch of others.  The journal is
toasted, and I have to treat the partition like it's ext2.  I've thus
far had to reinstall several font-related packages, xorg-packages, and
OpenOffice (just haven't found the others).  I'm back up and running,
but wondering what happened.

Unfortunately, this is the second time this has happened, last time it
was worse, it was /home.  Luckily I keep important stuff synched
between 3 boxes using Unison, so the /home failure wasn't as bad as it
could have been.

I'm just about to whack the box and install KUbuntu on it, but SuSE
just has a lot of good stuff going on.  This is the only box doing
this lately.  I've had failures in filesystems, but not this exact
behavior.

Thanks in advance.  There are no logs to speak of (they were wiped
with everything else).



- --
Matthew Carpenter
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

Enterprise Information Systems
* Network Server Appliances
* Security Consulting, Incident Handling & Forensics
* Network Consulting, Integration & Support
* Web Integration and E-Business
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