[CentOS] corrupted disk/drive issue...

[bruce]

Hi...

Ran into an interesting issue during the past week, and figured I'd post the
issue, and solution here in case it might come in handy for someone else...

The laptop was running, but it was left on with the lid closed for a day or
so.. when powered up, the laptop went into a state saying it couldn't find
the mounts... hmm.. shouldn't have thought this could happen. figured the
drive might screwing up, so i reinstalled FC8.

after a few hours, got everything back.. went and plugged the laptop into a
power strip that had a short..!! ouch, saw the same behavior.. got sort of
nervous, but thought it should be ok (hopefully!) so after another
reinstall, got to really wondering what was really going on...  didn't think
about it.. the laptop was working.. things were cool.. for a day! and after
closing the lid, and then reopening.. after another day or so. saw the same
behavior.

here's what i was seeing:

Filesystemtype is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

"VolGroup00" using etadata type lvm2
2 logical volumes in volume group "VolGroup00" now active


VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev dm-3
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3:  Invalid argument
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

========================================

at this point, talked to a few people, and started thinking that somehow the
disk was getting, had gotten corrupted.

so...

started to try to see what the drive had, if anything!

poped in the FC8 rescuedCD, and went to work..

ran the cmds:
lvm pvscan
lvm vgscan
lvm lvscan

since i had installed using the defaults for FC8 LVM, the drive showed that
it was basically ok.

went ahead and ran fdisk /dev/sda and saw that i indeed had my two
partitions /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2

so at this point..

i did a
  mkdir /dev/sysimage,
followed by a
  mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/sysimage

this worked, and got me to a point where i could hopefully fix/repair
whatever errs might be on the drive...

i then ran
  e2fsck -y /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

after a little hope.. and an amount of time as the system did it's thing, it
came back saying how many sectors where corrected, etc...

i then rebooted, and the laptop was back up/running as it should!

feel free to add to this if you have useful information, or additional
insight that you want to share.

peace.