Let me thank you in advance for any advice (or moral support) you give!

One of my boxes started experiencing EXT3-fs errors. The hard drive appeared to be fine (no bad blocks, no smartctl errors), but tech support suggested a HD cable swap, and finally a server swap. So, after the cable and server swap, the box was back online but exhibiting the same problem (EXT3-fs errors).

Tech support said they skipped a FSCK but that it should be run. What I wanted to do at this point was get a KVM hooked up to manually run FSCK, but I guess my request was overlooked and the server was rebooted and FSCK was run.

After FSCK completed, tech support closed the ticked and reported the box was online and responding. Unfortunately, I couldn’t log in (session closed as soon as I entered a username). I reopened the ticket and explained the situation. From what I understand, they again rebooted the server, only this time it didn’t come back online and halted with “Kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.” :eek:

Tech support left me with two options. I’ll let you guess what they are!

I opted to quickly take a peak with the KVM and hopefully recover from this disaster because I desperately need this box online.

So… I’m here looking for suggestions, hits, tips, solutions of any sort. I am on google soaking up all the info about this error that I can find.

From what I understand, the kernel has successfully loaded; however, it doesn’t know how to proceed because it doesn’t know where the root partition is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I need to specify the directory?

I’ll be right back…

I don't know exactly what steps to take in order to get things up and running again.

What can I do from the KVM once the system stops at that error?

If I get the drive slaved, I could (I hope) log in a mount it to view the data.

Would I be able to rebuild the drive so that it could then be booted again?

I wouldn't mind transferring the data over, but it's an Ensim 3.1 box and I fear that it will be a nightmare to transfer to a newer version.

Sad part about all this is that I couldn't run a full appliance backup because Ensim couldn't write to the disk!

It looks like I am truly up creek without a paddle. The majority of directories on my slaved drive seem to be corrupt. Including /home/virtual :eek: Everything is lost.

All is not lost.

I ran the ensim backup script on the old drive just before it died. Unfortunately, some of the large sites were not saved because ensim could not write to the disk, however, most of the smaller sites are fine.

What's even nicer is that Ensim 4.1.0 is actually capable of restoring the old 3.1 backups.

Having said that, I am still eager to recover data off the corrupt drive! At the moment I am looking for hard drive recovery centers and/or software that can analyze the corrupt hard drive.

While working on the new server, it crashed. I'm waiting to tech to update my ticket.