Yesterday I noticed my workstation wasn't on-line. When I went to check, it was sitting at a grub rescue prompt saying "unknown file system."

A short time ago we suffered a five-day power-outage. When the power was restored, my main workstation failed to restart. It seemed the power supply had failed, so it was replaced. The new power supply didn't fix the probem after all; the same symptoms occurred when trying to boot. The real problem was revealed by a lucky glance as the graphics card sparked and glowed during a power cycle attempt. Removing the graphics card and using the on-board video allowed the system to boot; it's inconclusive if the original PSU had a problem at all. After the system booted, the Ubuntu Unity desktop kept crashing; a little research showed that the on-board graphics adapter is lacking in 3D support. Adding the Gnome fall-back desktop allowed the system to boot and run until I install another nVidia graphics card. The system (finally) worked fine, although I found I was used to Unity and had to rediscover where things were in Gnome. 

I only use the desktop directly on occasion. More often I use the laptop. Still, the desktop is on as it acts as the back-up storage for the main server, and I can access it via the internet to gain access to documents and bits of work that aren't stored elsewhere.

Yesterday I sat down to do a little work and found the aforementioned grub rescue message. After much tinkering and three attempts to make a USB thumb drive (the box has no optical drive, and I long ago lost my network boot server; I had rarely had reason to use it, so I didn't restore it on the new server when I retired the old one), I finally got a running system again.

I was relieved to find the main archive file system stiil in place; of course that'll only fail when the other server fails and I need to get back some critical data. I also found the main disk data partitions were available; I've separated /home and /usr/local from the rest of root, although not as much has ended up in /usr/local as I used to put there.

The main disk's boot and root partition has been rendered in some state of "machine breakery." The disk manager shows it's there, but has an unknown file system. Attempting to change the file system to the expected ext4 causes the disk to become unavailable. I resolved to replace the partition and just install the OS again; nearly everything of value except a few hopefully easy to replace configuration choices are on the other partitions--the Java is in /usr/local, and all of my data is in /home, so that part of the system worked out well!

I have plugged in an old, unused experimental IDE-CF adapater, with a 16GB card inserted; kind of a poor-man's SSD. I'd planned to use this to rekindle my Sun workstation, but time hasn't allowed that, either. I thought to use part of the broken partition for /var to reduce re-writing to the CF, but I couldn't affect that partition on the drive without running into the problems of trying to use it as the main boot partition anyway.

After several attempts to work with the broken boot partition I've decided that there's probably something physical wrong with it, at least in that part of the drive, and the disk needs to be deeply scanned for bad sectors or retired outright.

I plugged-in a generous USB drive and copied the bulk of the data from my /home folder to it; the Java and other things in /usr/local can be replaced with other downloads. Most concerning are the VMs, which smoetimes don't work well after being copied. A lot of the data has already been backed-up to DropBox or Box or Copy or SugarSync or some other cloud storage, so I'm glad I've been doing that, too. About the only things not there are my in-progress work folders, most of which are branched and frequently committed to the SVN server (on the other box, which is then backed-up to the bigger archive drive...), but there are some things I was working on that aren't committed.

After this copy is done, I'll try to check and repartition the drive and use it again. If that fails, it'll be a quick trip to the hardware store for a new drive. And maybe that 3D video card.