hello all,
please, help!
we suffered out of power today and one of our Linux boxes cannot boot properly:
..
hda set_driver_speed_status error 0X04
VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
...
the only thing that i can do - is boot in the rescue mode. i've already added noinitrd to grub.conf file.
the etc/fstab is OK, fdisk -l
shows
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 *
fsck doesn't work..
fdisk /dev/hda doesn't work..
please, help me to boot,
Maria.
Maria, I can give you my guess as to what is going on. But bear in mind that it is only a guess. An ATA drive can transfer data 2 different ways: PIO (programmed io) and DMA (direct memory access). PIO is slow but even the first ATA drives support it. DMA is fast but it comes in different speeds. There are various rules for what is the higher speed supported. For example 66 MB/s requires an 80 pin connector. In your case, it seems like a speed that used to work no longer does. To me, this implies hardware damage. PIO is used during bootup and I would kinda expect the OS to run very very slowly without DMA working. (But I am not completely sure of this.) So I also suspect additional hardware damage beyond what is being reported.
What I would do: I always make sure that I have a way to do a fresh OS install on a new box and load my latest backups. (A "bare metal restore" is a typical term.) I would try that now, but I would not be too surprised if it fails. And if it fails, the hardware needs repair.
well, thanks a lot for replay, yet the news are not so consolatory 
but i'm also incline to try reinstall, especially because the box was almost empty before the failure. there were no needed data, only OS and the oracle client installation on the middle of which the power in a whole building shut down and everything died.
i just wanted to try to fix it for the sport of it, but nothing worked. also, what i have to mention, is that during the oracle client installation, i made
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.18
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
this is a preinstall requirement for oracle. then the power died and since it came back, the box cannot boot. my question is could it somehow "remember" this setting, despite the fact the this setting is only work for current session? could this setting somehow cause this problem and if yes, is there the way to unset this param?
thanks for your help and suggestions,
M.