A self inflicted hard reboot caused a bad block write on my Fedora 16 laptop the other day. Usually this isn’t much of a problem (I have been using Linux everyday for about 12 years now) but I discovered something; something I didn’t know until AFTER the reboot.
Fedora 16 has changed to a using GPT disk labels instead of the old standard DOS partition labels. While this is a HUGE improvement over a system that has been in place over 30 years now; it does lend to some problems when debugging issues because I have not used this format before.
So over the last couple weeks I have lived with some bad blocks and simply exited out of the rescue boot to complete the boot process (as I tried, without any luck, to fix my problem the old way.) Well, the solution finally presented itself. Not only will the updated Linux fsck command fix the problem now, but this solution will fix most system hard drive sector issues; and it is easy.
From the rescue command prompt type:
blkid
To identify the block partitions that are present on the system. Read your crash error message and identify the bad partition by name; and then locate the partition name in the results of blkid. Finally run:
fsck -y /dev/mapper/root.hd-1
Replacing /dev/mapper/root.hd-1 with the full correct path of the drive partition name provided by blkid. Then finish your boot and go back to the rest of your wonderful Linux experience.