GeckoLinux
Member
Hi there, a friend contacted me with a Thinkpad T440 laptop that was running the latest Ubuntu LTS. They closed the lid (presumably went into hibernation) and came back a little while later and opened it to find a GRUB rescue command line with "unknown filesystem". Before that they were just using Chrome.
I booted it with a live Linux USB and it shows /dev/sda1 has a 512MB FAT32 partition, which was presumably for EFI. It's mountable, but completely empty. I tried an fsck on it but still nothing. Then, /dev/sda2 is an extended partition, and inside that there is large /dev/sda5 partition which is an "unknown filesystem". I'm currently running Photorec on the drive, and it's recovering a huge amount of files. Also, the S.M.A.R.T report on the disk says everything is OK.
So first of all, after recovering whatever possible with Photorec, what tricks would you recommend to try to recover the root filesystem? It was installed by a non-technical user, so I assume it was just the default EXT4 that Ubuntu uses. This is what I was considering trying:
- http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=143054
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/114429/short-read-while-trying-to-open-partition
- https://superuser.com/questions/1097009/ext4-partition-type-unknow-after-restart-and-cannot-be-mount
And secondly, how can I figure out what hardware exactly is failing? Can the S.M.A.R.T. report be trusted? Or could it have bad RAM?
Thanks a lot!
I booted it with a live Linux USB and it shows /dev/sda1 has a 512MB FAT32 partition, which was presumably for EFI. It's mountable, but completely empty. I tried an fsck on it but still nothing. Then, /dev/sda2 is an extended partition, and inside that there is large /dev/sda5 partition which is an "unknown filesystem". I'm currently running Photorec on the drive, and it's recovering a huge amount of files. Also, the S.M.A.R.T report on the disk says everything is OK.
So first of all, after recovering whatever possible with Photorec, what tricks would you recommend to try to recover the root filesystem? It was installed by a non-technical user, so I assume it was just the default EXT4 that Ubuntu uses. This is what I was considering trying:
- http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=143054
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/114429/short-read-while-trying-to-open-partition
- https://superuser.com/questions/1097009/ext4-partition-type-unknow-after-restart-and-cannot-be-mount
And secondly, how can I figure out what hardware exactly is failing? Can the S.M.A.R.T. report be trusted? Or could it have bad RAM?
Thanks a lot!