[afnog] SuSE /root problem

[Brian Candler]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 09:16:19AM +0300, Mike Barnard wrote:
> Hi, i got a problem with a SuSE 7.2. there was no hard disk activity,
> nothing was working. i rebooted and it cant come up. ran hdd test and
> still cant boot, ive done a repair installation and i get an error that
> YaST cannot find a valid root partition.

1. Is the hard drive detected at all? (If booting from a rescue CD, do you
   see messages about hda? At power-up does the BIOS detect the hard drive?)

2. Can you read blocks from it? Boot from rescue CD, try
      dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null count=512
   (which will read the first 512 0.5K blocks, or 256KB of data)

3. Is there a valid partition table on the hard drive? (i.e. boot from
   rescue CD, run 'fdisk /dev/hda', use 'p' to print partition table,
   what does it show?)

If 1 or 2 fails, then it looks like you have a low-level hardware problem:
the drive has died completely, the controller has died completely, the cable
is duff, or so on. Examining kernel boot messages carefully might be able to
show if the controller is OK or not; or just plug in a different HD and see
if you can boot that.

Regards,

Brian.