Problems Mounting Drive


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Hello,

I have an eeepc 900 with two SSD drives.

Primary = 4 GB

Secondary = 16 GB

A few weeks ago I had an issue where errors were coming up during boot for my second drive (/dev/sdb). I ran chkfs several times, and then my drive became unbootable. I had error messages saying that a bad superblock was found.

I recently reformatted the laptop with debian. When i tried to format /dev/sdb, the format was successful. However, the installer attempts to mount the drive to finish installation. I got errors from the installer saying the drive could not be mounted. So I installed debian on the first drive only.

Once I got my debian system online, I tried formatting and mounting the second drive again. I ran mke2fs by typing "mke2fs /dev/sdb1". Everything went fine.

I tried to mount the drive and I got the following error:

asus459:~# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/local -t ext2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
	   missing codepage or helper program, or other error
	   In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
	   dmesg | tail  or so

Here is the dmesg output:

[ 1461.968897] sd 1:0:1:0: [sdb] 31522176 512-byte hardware sectors (16139 MB)
[ 1461.968929] sd 1:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 1461.968934] sd 1:0:1:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 1461.968989] sd 1:0:1:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 1461.969004] EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock

Is there anyway to determine if this is hardware damage?

Any insight is much appreciated.

Thanks.

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Sounds like the hard drive might be going bad, like ichi said, try fsck and see what it says.

You could boot into a hard drive diagnostic tool to see if the hard drive is failing.

If you don't already have one, you could go to the manufacture's website of your hard drive and download their diagnostic tool.

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Thanks guys.

I was getting errors from fsck about a missing superblock still.

I decided to format the whole drive with "mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb"

I was actually able to mount the drive after this.

So i went through creating a primary partition and then formatting /dev/sdb1.

I can mount the partition correctly now.

I don't understand why that worked, but it's working fine...for now. :D

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That's weird. sdb would the the very start of the drive, including the MBR and partition table.

Maybe when you issued a command to sdb, you initialized the partition table in some weird way? :unsure:

:iiam:

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mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb

You should use ext3, not ext2, with ext2, you have really high risk of corrupting ou losing your file. In fact, just rebboting using the power/reset button have almost 80% chance of currupting your partition.

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You should use ext3, not ext2, with ext2, you have really high risk of corrupting ou losing your file. In fact, just rebboting using the power/reset button have almost 80% chance of currupting your partition.

I'm using ext2 because it is non-journaled. Apparently it's better for solid state disk drives as it doesn't need to write the journal to disk at specific intervals.

That's weird. sdb would the the very start of the drive, including the MBR and partition table.

Maybe when you issued a command to sdb, you initialized the partition table in some weird way? unsure.gif

Yeah it is. I would think that I made a mistake except that both the Ubuntu and Debian installers couldn't mount the drive even after they automatically formatted it. Who knows. At least it's working now

Thanks again to everyone for all the help.

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You can turn off journaling (I believe) in ext3. Use ext3 over ext2 (and better yet ext4 as its code is now stable/final but turn off journaling).

From what I've been reading, the only way to disable journaling in ext3 is to mount the partition as ext2. Is there even a point to doing this (reformatting the drive as ext3 and then mounting it as ext2)?

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From what I've been reading, the only way to disable journaling in ext3 is to mount the partition as ext2. Is there even a point to doing this (reformatting the drive as ext3 and then mounting it as ext2)?

None. Ext3 is just Ext2+journal.

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