Partition issue after hibernate [Solved: Backup, reinstall]

[eeefurious]

I have an ASUS EEE 900 with Lisa Gnome installed. I recently found myself stuck without access to power and hibernated my machine, which subsequently lost all battery power.

Now, every time I attempt to start Linux the computer hangs dead or in recovery mode stops after spitting out the following:

Code: Select all

kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...
Done.
EXT3-fs: <blahblah>
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: BMDA stat 0x24
ata1.00: cmd <snipped>
              res <moresnipped>
ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata1.00: error: { UNC }
<snipped>
ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xef)
ata1.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4)
ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
ata1: device is not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
ata1: soft resetting link

Each time I attempt to start it does some variation on this, though sometimes one line reads:

Code: Select all

ata1.00: command failed: Read DMA

At first I thought this might be a hard drive failure, but I can still boot to Windows on another partition. Could the damage here be just my root partition?

I've been trying to do some recovery using an install USB but it too hangs on startup on my EEE. Using another computer it loads, albeit slowly, to the LiveCD environment so I know it is working. I'm going to try installing a different version of LISA to the install USB for the moment.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

[eeefurious]

An update:

I grabbed an Arch install ISO and loaded it into my USB stick. Using that I was able to get a shell running. I get the exact same Read DMA failure whenever I try to mount my Linux partition or run e2fsck on the partition. Not only that it hangs the entire operating system when it even tries to gain access to that partition.

It seems like this might somehow be caused by a read in the SSD going bad but it seems odd that it hangs the entire OS any time it tries to read a partition that is not even mounted.

[eeefurious]

A little more digging into SSDs suggests to me that it may well be that a sector has just worn out and is causing the drive to hang on reset or something. At this point any suggestions about backing up the drive would be quite welcome.

[eeefurious]

In conclusion, the drive just needed to be wiped and re-partitioned.

First I copied the drive from ext2read from Windows to access and copy all my files to a USB stick. Then I used gparted in Parted Magic to clear out and repartition. Finally, I reinstalled using Mint 13 after attempting Mint 14 which failed to install. So solved, the solution is burn everything. EVERYTHING.