Repair disk from live CD

Alessandro R72

4/16/24, 1:44 PM

I have a PC which do no boot for disk problems, when starting I see messages like ...

bulk update request IO error, dev sda, sector (some number)
Buffer IO Error on dev sda (I cannot copy & paste the exact message since it remains for too few time) many times, and then last with:

Free initramfs and swith to another root fs:
chroot to NEW_ROOT, delete all in /, move NEW_ROOT to /
...

(initramfs) [a prompt with some command, I can use ls and cd, but I do not find any usefull file]

It's not the first time it appens, in the past I booted from live CD (usb to be onest) and lauched a fsck or some similar command by the graphical interface and everything turn to work for some weeks. Now from the live CD, if I use the disk utility I see the disk, with 2 partition, the EFI which seems ok, and the other with Linux SO, which has 1696 damaged sectors, if i run the file system check (from disk) I get this message:

Error checking filesystem on /dev/sd2: Process report exit code 8: e2fsck 1.46.5 
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda2 (udisk-error-quark, 0)

If I try to repair it the message is almost the same (error repairing, instead of error checking) I've tried also sudo fsck /dev/sda2, but the result is almost the same:

fsck.ext4: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda2
Is it possibile that this is a zero size partition?

Now I do not need to recover the full SO, I just like to have a check if there are some data to save, extract them and then I think I will throw away that old PC. It's not mine, so I do not know exaclty where can be the data to save. Is there a way to execute a disk check that will allow me to have a look to that disk? If it's a dangerous command that can event destroy some file, it doesn't matter ... I just want to recover something. I also thought to re-install Ubuntu, but I'm not sure that option will preserve the old data.

Thanks in advance for any help

272

0 + 2

boot

fsck

mikewhatever

4/16/24, 2:04 PM

Usually, repairing disks requires expensive equipment, which is far beyond the means of an avarage user. That said, if the disk woks, you can sometimes try to repair a filesystem. This is what fsck does, and it looks like the disk in question does not work. To avoid data loss in the future, backup all important data.

guiverc

4/16/24, 10:32 PM

If you have a *failing* disk; disk checks (`fsck`) where data is written is **not** want you want to do.. You want to avoid using the disk until you know it's health (ie. use drive's SMART capability), then create a plan. Concentrate on reading data & getting data off; write or change data only if necessary (*each write can reduce chance of getting data off successfully*). No OS/product/release is mentioned & I see nothing on-topic in this question though; SE *Unix & Linux* covers Linux and your question is not even linux but about hardware as I see it.

Elon Musk

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EN: Repair disk from live CD

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