Catestrophic failure

[Net Llama!]

On 05/17/2005 07:14 PM, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
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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).

Assuming that you've ruled out foul play, this screams hardware failure. 
  Either the disk(s) are going bad, or possibly RAM, or even the CPU. 
Have you run a SMART check on the disks lately?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand		 		http://netllama.linux-sxs.org

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