One of my hard drives has developed a hardware error and my machine won't boot up. It appears to hang while trying to 'fsck' the filesystem. What would be the best method to replace the drive. I am running an old version of SCO Unix. Can I bypass the corrupted disk?

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First, I would try booting up with an emergency boot floppy, which I am sure you have made. Then:

fsck /dev/hd0root

If it comes up, you are done.

If you still have problems and you know that you must install another hard drive, do the following.

Enter mkdev hd -u or mkdev hd -h if you require detailed usage and help information for mkdev.

Select the type of hard disk that you want to add to the system.

IDA disks: Enter the logical number of the disk and the number of the controller to which it is connected.

SCSI disks: Enter the host adapter type and number, the bus number, the disk controller ID, and the LUN of the disk.

Choose to continue the installation, or exit. If you choose to continue the installation, the driver outputs a message to show it has been initialized. The mkdev hd script now runs the programs dkinit(ADM), fdisk(ADM), badtrk(ADM), and divvy(ADM) in sequence to configure the hard disk for use.

If your disk has an IDE, EIDE, ESDI, or IDA controller, mkdev hd runs dkinit(ADM) to allow you to change the physical parameters defined for the disk such as its geometry, and whether it supports error correction.

The mkdev hd script runs divvy(ADM) to allow you to divide a UNIX system partition into separate filesystems and swap areas.

For more information:

Discuss the best ways to fix hardware errors

and

Tip: Disaster recovery

This was first published in October 2001

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