[mythtvnz] Looks like my system drive is faulty - ideas?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 17:20:42 +1200, you wrote:

>On 24/06/2012, at 4:59 PM, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:38:41 +1200, you wrote:
>> 
>>> A know reason for CMOS settings to go awry is a dying CMOS back up battery.
>>> I had to replace one this week.
>>> -Paul
>> 
>> Yes, but I have had the settings go bad with batteries that were fine
>> for several more years.  When the battery dies, it is usually fairly
>> obvious, with strange settings showing up in the BIOS screens, or the
>> settings reverting to defaults on each boot.  CMOS battery life is not
>> easy to predict either.  In a well designed motherboard, the CMOS RAM
>> should not be drawing more power than the lithium battery loses
>> sitting on a shelf.  And the shelf life of a lithium battery should be
>> 7 years at least.  But some motherboards need the battery replaced as
>> often as every 2-3 years.  Typical seems to be around 4-5 years.
>> 
>I found a bootable cd. Boots ok and I can see two of my three drives listed in /dev. Also in bios setup. Plugged the suss drive back in and system stays up. Now I need to figure out mounting drives after a cd boot and how to scan for the suss drive.
>
>Don't think cmos is bad but could be time to get a new battery just in case.

Mounting is pretty simple.

  mkdir /mnt
  cd /mnt
  mkdir sdx<x>1
  mount /dev/sd<x>1 sd<x>1

and repeat for any other partitions on that drive.

But before mounting, I would want to force a full check all the
partitions.  Use:

  fdisk -l

or if you are using GPT partition tables instead of the DOS format
ones (usually if you have bootable drives > 3 Gbytes):

  gfdisk -l

to list the partitions.  Then

  fsck -C -f /dev/sd<x>1

and so on to check and fix any file system errors.  If you are
paranoid, then do

  fsck -C -nf /dev/sd<x>1

first to see what problems there are before fixing them.

If there is missing software not on the CD, you can use apt-get to
download and install it into the CD's ramdrive, but it will of course
be gone again on reboot.