Alfred von Campe wrote: > On Aug 2, 2006, at 11:12, Matty wrote: > >> I would also recommend running a long SMART self-test on the drive. >> If you capture the SMART attributes before and after the test, it is >> actually pretty easy to locate the source of the problem (e.g., host >> controller vs disk disk vs. bad sector ) by comparing the SMART >> attributes that were captured. If you want additional details, check >> out the following article: > > > Thanks for the URL. I'd love to run a SMART analysis, but apparently > smartctl doesn't support SATA drives. At least the version that comes > with CentOS doesn't (I haven't tried to rebuild it from sources - yet)! > > I tried accessing the drive from the CentOS LiveCD, and wasn't > successful. There are two partitions on the drive, one for /boot, and > the rest of the disk is managed by LVM. I was able to mount the / boot > partition, but I couldn't read the grub directory due to apparent > corruption (that's a bad sign right there). But maybe I can recover > some of the data from the rest of the disk. How do I mount the logical > partitions managed by LVM from the command line? I haven't had a > chance to google for this/read the man page, so if someone has a quick > synopsis handy, I would really appreciate it. > > Alfred > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos Alfred, the CentOS smartctl _does_ work (for me at least) with SATA disks if you use the "-d ata" option. So please try smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda You can run a long test with smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sda You better not try to e2fsck a dying disk ... try to copy it with ddrescue, and run e2fsck on the copy, and mount the copy afterwards. An external USB disk is very handy for that purpose. Kay