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

[David Moore]

On 24/06/12 19:44, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> 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.
>

Slightly red-faced here. (1) Had a mental block about how you could 
possibly mkdir on a read only cd. Duh! Anyway I can mount the two good 
drives. Red face (2): It seems I moved my system from the bad/old drive 
to one of the working drives some time ago so all is not lost. Totally 
forgot about this. Just need to get booting from the relevant disk 
working. Seems the Grub MBR was on the bad drive so need to create it on 
the good drive, configure and I should be up again.