XC26
Senior Member
Do you mean it wouldn’t boot because of a locked Superblock? In Unix land a Superblock is the disk block at the head of the unix file system, the block that contains all the information to access the whole file system tree. Without access to the (or a backup) Superblock, the system can not boot. In the old days we would try repairing it by booting from an alternative system and running “fsck” to locate and use a backup Superblock to repair the damged file system. However, and in more recent times, this was mostly a waste of time as the cause was almost always a hardware fault with the disk. One simple test for a dodgy disk would be to boot up from an external Linux installation, e.g. CD, and type something like “cat /dev/hda > /dev/null” in a Terminal window or console if not using a desktop session (assuming your internal hard disk is assigned hda in the devices list). After a while messages indicating a damaged disk would appear in the Terminal, e.g. “Read or seek error: block 1234567”, or some such mumbo.
