[gentoo-user] Re: Unable to mount root dir, Segmentation failure with mount

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

pge07beb@studserv.uni-leipzig.de wrote:
> 
> Hi gentoo-users,
> 
> I'm running Gentoo flawlessly on my laptop for nearly one year now, but 
> since yesterday, I'm in big trouble. At some instance (surfing in the 
> web,.. nothing horrible) the screen froze and the only thing I was able 
> to do, was pressing the power button 4seconds to shut the computer down.
> 
> I was never able to boot my system since then.
> 
> It sayed always things like: Not able to find root file system  (or 
> likewise)

There was good advice from the other users here, but also try a live CD 
with a more recent kernel (Gentoo 2008.0-r1 for example, or something 
else like openSUSE 11).  Also, if removing the journal doesn't work, try 
to mount it as ext2 (ext3 is backwards compatible with ext2 so doing 
that is perfectly OK).

As to the cause of this, I suspect a hardware failure due to overheating 
(laptops tend to do that if you don't open them and give them a thorough 
cleaning each 10 months or so).  I'm an overclocker and things like this 
can happen when a CPU or chipset overheats (corrupted data starts to get 
written on disk).  The other possibility is that the drive is dying 
(damaged sectors).

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