Re: F32 not booting

Wednesday, 27 January 2021

On Wed, 27 Jan 2021 at 05:17, GianPiero Puccioni <
gianpiero.puccioni(a)isc.cnr.it&gt; wrote:

...
 Hi,

 yesterday my laptop with F32 didn't boot.
 It goes in emergency mode and creates a rdsosreport file

 I usually don't do this but this time when I installed F I let the system
 create
 the partitions and I think it's LVM with XFS but I'm not sure of the
 latter and
 I am not familiar with this method.

 Is there something to do to try to recover something about this, like the
 files from /home as of course the USB stick I used for backups went crazy
 too
 and I could recover only a fraction of it. It doesn't seem that it was the
 HD
 that want all bad as the Win10 partition still works.

Often a spinning disk will have a small region that goes bad, so nearly all
the
data can be recovered using ddrescue or similar tools.   Older spinning
disks
have less precise head positioning and become more sensitive to temperature
extremes, so here in Canada, disk errors sometimes disappear if you let a
cold
system warm up for a few hours.

You should try to sort out the backups in case ddrescue fails.

...

 If I run lvm_scan I get this:
 Scanning devices sda7  for LVM logical volumes fedora_shure/root
 fedora_shure/swap
 ACTIVE '/dev/fedora_shure/root' [50.00 GiB] inherit
 ACTIVE '/dev/fedora_shure/swap' [<3.88 GiB] inherit
 inactive '/dev/fedora_shure/home' [<166.95 GiB] inherit

 and in /dev/fedora_shure there is only root and swap

 I'll attach both the rdsosreport and output of journalctl(as suggested by
 the
 error message)

There are disk errors in the journalctl file (the rdsosreport also has
journalctl
output).    I would check for a loose cable and use ddrescue to create a
copy of the raw drive on a new drive.   One of the messages is:

Jan 26 14:06:22 shure kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#18 Add. Sense:
Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed

You have a spinning platter disk.  These reserve some unallocated blocks
which are used to replace blocks
that have errors.  "auto reallocate failed" occurs when the spare blocks
have all been used.  Sometimes the
"errors" are due to a bad cable and the disk is actually fine but needs
low-level formatting to recover the
spare blocks (and low-level formatting may not be available to users
these days).

Many users complain that their laptop has slowed down when a disk is doing
a lot of "bad" block replacements.
If I hear about the slowdown I try to get them a replacement disk.  Soon
after the slowdown starts the system
will fail to boot but in most cases booting from a live linux distro will
allow the user to recover important files.

I used to work with SGI systems that used XFS and applications that beat
the disks to death. I just replaced
failed disks and restored the data from backups.   The benefit of XFS was
that it could reboot after a crash
without a lengthy fsck process.   Some data would be lost, but in our
applications we were losing data while
systems were down.

Good luck.
-- 
George N. White III