[DONE] Mageia 5 corrupted Linux Mint 17.3 partitition

[paulz]

I hope someone can help me with the following.

I got a new (refurbished) laptop which is a Compaq Presario CQ57, with 4Gb RAM, a 500Gb hard drive, and AMD E-300 CPU.

It came with Windows 7, then I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa KDE 64 bit edition. After this, I downloaded a lot of and watched a few video torrent files.

Over a week later, I decided to try Mageia. I decided to divide my hard drive equally between the two distros. I resized my Mint partition to about half the size, then installed Mageia onto the free space. I could only install Mageia 5 KDE 32 bit, because the KDE 64 bit version just wouldn't install, but froze instead. This happened several times.

I used a GRUB 2 graphical bootloader. Mageia 5 seemed to boot fine, but then I found out that I had no access to the Mint partition and I couldn't boot into it either.

I later found out that after installing a few packages under Mageia 5, as well as downloading 6 video torrents I had hardly any disk space left, only about 23-40Mb at different times! I eventually realised that Mageia had been installed onto a partition of only about 7-8Gb, which seemed to leave a partition of over 215Gb unused! After all this, I re installed Mageia, making full use of about 250Gb of my 500Gb hard drive.

Mageia gave long vague, error messages whenever I tried to mount the LInux Mint partition, including "wrong fs" or "bad fs", but nothing definite. oand then I changed the bootloader to the older GRUB instead of GRUB2, but found that Mint disappeared from the list of options.

After all this I've installed GParted and am trying to get it to repair the Linux Mint partition, but obviously it says it might take a long time.

I've also got very frustrated by Mageia's inability to play video files with MP4A AAC audio, as well as the same provblem with streaming video. There seems to be no easy way to fix this, in spite of me reading up on it on these forums. I wonder why this is, although Linux Mint played these torrents immediately?

What should I do next?

[doktor5000]

One problem at a time please. Can you please post the output as root of

Code: Select all

fdisk -l
lsblk -f

And as did you attempt to repair the mint partition yet, did it complete?

[isadora]

The output of fdisk -l is "command not found"! I've tried to use the command urpmi to install fdisk and it also says "command not found!" I can't find it under Software Management either.

lsblk gives the following output...

Code: Select all

sblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
sda                     
├─sda1                   
├─sda5                   
├─sda6                   [SWAP]
├─sda7                   /
├─sda8                   [SWAP]
└─sda9                   /home
sr0                      /run/media/paulb/Linux Mint 17.3 KDE 64-bit

My attempted repair of the Mint partition now seems to have completed, but my attempt to mount it gives the same old error message. This is...

An error occurred while accessing '231.1 GiB Hard Drive', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sda1 at /run/media/paulb/bb6cc6fc-7720-4465-b622-254b67b14a35: Command-line `mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sda1" "/run/media/paulb/bb6cc6fc-7720-4465-b622-254b67b14a35"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: /dev/sda1 is already mounted or /run/media/paulb/bb6cc6fc-7720-4465-b622-254b67b14a35 busy

I wanted to try Mageia after years of Ubuntu, followed by a year of Mint, because I remembered the nice user friendly Mandrake installer, but it seems that Mageia is anything but user friendly!

[benmc]

fdisk -l needs to be run as root, as does urpmi.
"fdisk" is installed by default, no need to install it.

the second command given by Doktor5000 does not explicitly require to be run as root, which is why there is as output.

please try again.

[boombaby]

I add a point here about "who" corrupted "whom" - if corruption is the thing.

Here's why...

Over recent times I have tried installing many distros, and have had the opportunity to use the Mageia-5 disk-partitioner in MCC (Media Control Centre), and Gparted (which is often supplied/used in various distros for their installation).

My experience is that there is some particular kind of difference occurring. I suspect it is only occasional too, perhaps linked to different versions/brands of Gparted, OR that Gparted can be setup (by Distro protocol or by User choice) to use a (slightly) different partition scheme. <Is that CHS and MiB???, or something else?> I do not know too much about the differences (so that will be for others to look at, and comment on).

A noticeable "effect" between the two partition TOOLS can sometimes be seen (visually) when partitioning is created/modified in one, then altered in the other. For instance, sometimes there is a small space of several MB left "spare" at the boundary (ie between the modified partition and neighbour).


So, to be clear, recently I had this (same) problem as defined in the first post. That is, installation of Mageia-5 came to a complete halt on several attempts AND resulted in the warning of unusable, corrupted partitions. Having already suspected a "difference" was occurring between partitioners I chose an alternate-fix by using a rescue disk with Partion Wizard on it (possibly also known as "Minitool") to settle the partitions, then re-doing the Mageia install with MCC (ie rather than with any participation of Gparted).

[It seems noteable that during partitioning at least two distros (from memory) could NOT detect my second drive at all, while one presented a wierd partition table even on the first disk too.]

THIS POST IS NOT A CRITICISM (OF ANY O/S, SOFTWARE, PERSON). THIS IS A CAUTIONARY NOTE.

Regards,
aka boombaby

[gohlip]

I resized my Mint partition to about half the size,

That's most likely the cause.

If you resize this partition from the beginning of the partition, it will destroy the first sector of that partition, that contains the core.img,... etc which will then make the OS unbootable..
Assuming that the OS itself is not compromised by the resizing, it is possible to resurrect that OS by manually booting into it [1] and recreating a new core.img.

Never a good idea to resize or move partitions.
Also best to prepare partitions before any installation.

[1] - but since you've changed Mageia's grub from grub2 to grub-legacy, that is more difficult to boot LM manually (for me - I may have forgotten how).

[paulz]

I have now solved all my problems with Mageia! Here's how I did it. After about 24 hours of struggling with Mageia, I inserted a Linux Mint KDE 64 bit Live DVD, which I prepared under Mageia, but I'd re recorded that DVD a few times. The installation always stopped at "Copying files...26%". After this, my hard drive was unbootable and I couldn't even get Firefox to visit any web site except the Mint home page, because it crashed. Next, I arranged to meet up with a friend whose desktop PC building course I did a year ago, so he could give me a working Linux Mint KDE 64 bit. I picked up the Mint DVD, brought it home and installed it, using the whole hard drive, wiping out all the corrupted files that were there. Since doing this, I haven't had any problems with Mageia at all. I advise everyone reading this to do the same.

[boombaby]

Pretty poor form, paulz...

You could have just said, "I have a big problem which persistently plagues me, and I am unable to resolve it with anyone", and left it at that - couldn't you?

N.B.
If I got a dollar for every smarty-ar-pants I've ever met I would be filthy rich by now. Think about it, I could have got another dollar for you too. (Damn! It's so annoying. [muses...] Perhaps I could organize something with Bitcoin?[/muses])

.
Alas, I forget. You're not reading this because you've f'd off now. Oh, well.

[paulz]

I am reading this. I'm trying to mark it solved or done, but I can't even find that option!

[Ken-Bergen]

I am reading this. I'm trying to mark it solved or done, but I can't even find that option!

You can mark the thread by clicking on the Edit button of your first post and adding [SOLVED] or [DONE] to the beginning of the title.