[ILUG] odd partition errors

[Ray Kelly]

Lo all.

I've run into a little problem with a box at home.
It's an ancient machine (p-166, 128 Ram, buckets of disks, running RH 6.2) 
which I use primarly as a filer & dial out box for my home lan etc etc.

On boot it does all the normal things that one would expect, checking HW,
loading modules starting swap setting hostname, until it gets to checking
filesystems for rw mounting 
the following prints out.
fsck.ext2Could this be a zero-length partition?
: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hda1

hda1 is /boot & is 30 Mb in size

Then I get the "error occourred during FS check. Dropping you to a shell;
the system will reboot when you leave the shell." yada yada yada

an fdisk session doesn't yield anything out of the ordaniary with this but an 
fsck barfs all over the place with the zero length parition message again,

What I've done to get around this is to re-write the superblock & then 
re-run an fsck which tells me that there were a few problems which it fixed 
(I can't remember the exact errors apart from the fact that there was a 
problem with the number of free inodes)

I mount the partition & all looks ok. Re-hoof the system & everything is grand
until the _next_ re-boot when the exact same thing happens again.

since I've taken a tarball of the partition, dd'd /dev/zero into it,
re-formatted it. restored stuff into there, but the same problem still
persists on the second boot.

Has anyone got any idea as to what could be going on here. The disk is, to 
the best of my knowledge still good & happily takes regular I/O abuse, I'm 
tempted to blitz /boot as it's own partition & just use a boot dir on / 
but I'd prefer not to as that's just a hack and I'm not too sure if I'd be 
hitting old lilo's 8GB problem (will be addressed later).

This pc spends 99% + of it's time at the back of a cabinet with neither head
nor keyboard attached & doesn't get powercycled unless the ESB decide for me, 
which means that fixing this in the future could be quite awkward due to my 
particular space & cabling & monitor carrying requirements!

e2fsprogs 1.18 is what I've got on this system & a uname tells me that I've 
got a stock Red Hat Built 2.2.15 kernal which I should probably upgrade.

anyway, thoughts & suggestions are appreciated

ta
	Ray ...