can I use a damaged drive? + diagnosing problems from pxe boot

[Matt Price]

On Sat, 2006-30-12 at 01:58 -0500, Jamon Camisso wrote:
> Matt Price wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > this is the next in what's turning into a series of posts stemming from
> > an install attempt on a problematic laptop.  This is a compaq TC1100
> > which had some kind of serious undiagnosed problem when the last user
> > ran windows on it.  There's no cd and it doesn't seem to want to boot
> > from usb, so pxe seems to be the only way to boot the thing.  I've
> > gotten pretty far into the process that way using ubuntu's netboot
> > procedure but that died with a bunch of hardware errors:  (approximate,
> > can't type from machine):
> > 
> > end_request: I/O error, dev hda, secot 4456449
> > EXT4-fs error: read_block_bitmap: cannot read block bitmap
> > block_group=17, block_bitmap=557056
> > Aborting journal on device hda1
> > ext3_abort called
> > extr-fs error:  ext3_journal_start_sb: detected aborted journal.  
> > Remounting fs read-only
> > Journal has aborted
> > 
> > subsequent fsck's and badblock commands generate further errors; fsck
> > "can't read superblock" and badblocks stalls at block 28480 of 57833999
> > (ok, actually I see it is continuing a bit past there, but with multiple
> > "dma timeout error's" -- status=0x58 and 0x59, driveReady SeekComplete
> > DataRequest, and also 0x40 "UncorrectableError).  
> > -----
> > so,, first question:  is this proof positive that the HD is bad?  Can I
> > work with a damaged disk or is that simply foolishness?
> > 
> > now as it happens this model uses a super-thin hd and they're pretty
> > expensive.  If the disk is bad, I'd like to check whether the rest of
> > the system is in good shape before I invest in a new disk.  So I'd like
> > to run some kind of diagnostics off of a live cd, but I don't have a
> > cd-drive...  So I was wondering if anyone knew of tricks for running
> > live cd's via pxe boot.  Also if you had suggestions for which cd's
> > offer the best hardware diagnostic tools (something I don't know much
> > about.  
> 
> My suggestion would be to boot off a usb key. It looks like that unit is 
> new enough.
> 
> Slax is a very nice <200mb pen drive distro that really comes in handy 
> for such situations. There are also 2 other versions, one that will fit 
> on a 64mb key iirc.
> 
> A quick Debian pen drive install:
> http://d-i.pascal.at/
> 
> I haven't poked around, but http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ looks very 
> useful too.
> 

well, that was my first thought too, but it just won't see the usb
drives.  Another indication that there's somethng fundamentally wrong
with the machine perhaps, but for now I'd still like to try anddiagnose
the issue.

matt

> Jamon
> --
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-- 
Matt Price
History Dept
University of Toronto
matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
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