The Monday 2004-08-09 at 22:50 +0200, Christian Boltz wrote:
Even the DVD and CD (SuSE 9.1) refused to boot! [...] Went to sleep.
Awoke, memtest, nothing.
Hmm, otherwise this would have been my first question ;-)
Rebooted (init 1) , no problem. reiserfsck, problems detected, corrected, fix-fizable (and a few more yesterday). Then init 3, ok, copied the root partition to the new partition created yesterday, no problem. Now init 5, writing this, running ok, 3:32 hours so far.
What happened!? :-/
Maybe your harddisk starts to fail. Create a backup first und test your harddisk with "badblocks". Also have a look at /var/log/messages, if there are any interesting messages there (especially while running badblocks).
No, nothing there, and SMART would detect them as well. If the system finds a badblock while running, it is reported immediately on console 10, with the sector number - I know, I saw it happening time ago. There are indeed a few badblocks in one of my hard disk, but they were remapped by the HD firmware more than a year ago, and there are no new ones. That's acceptable: I can remember when all hard disks came with a few badblocks, listed on a paper sticker, when newly bought.
AFAIK, ReiserFS can create "interesting effects" if there's a hardware failure.
Yea :-( Ext2/3 is more resilient in that case.
Can a fault at the '/' partition render the rescue CD/DVD inoperable?
IMHO: no, it shouldn't do so. But it may do if it tries to mount the existing partitions.
That's my thought. It shouldn't try to check partitions till told to, because after all, it is a rescue thing.
This is the kernel log, at the time of the first crash - it is related to reiserfs - therefore I think we should all get as far of reiserfs as possible till this is fully solved and debugged:
Aug 3 16:56:56 nimrodel kernel: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000 [...] Aug 3 16:56:56 nimrodel kernel: Oops: 0000 [#1]
This is a kernel oops. Not nice :-(
Try to run ksymoops, this could make the output clearer.
I just did. Lots of things, but useless for me - unless a kernel developer requests it here, I will not post it. What I see is problems with reiserfs, one of them from today. I still have not reformatted my root partitions, but I will have too. I'm seeing strange crashes (wdm, gnome-terminal, gkrellm), and they started just after I tried that name clashing reported on this thread, so I blame it.
{reboot, after manual reiserfsck from rescue dvd} Aug 3 17:44:46 nimrodel kernel: hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError } [...] Aug 3 17:44:47 nimrodel kernel: hdb: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
Hmm, errors with hda and hdb. Are you sure your IDE-cable is ok?
Yes, and I replaced it a month and a half ago. That error is reported only by SuSE 9.1, not by SuSE 8.2 (I updated in June), and only once during boot. I assume the kernel tried something, [X session just crashed on me. Nothing in the logs, except this: Aug 11 13:40:56 nimrodel gconfd (cer-5498): Received signal 15, shutting down cleanly Aug 11 13:40:56 nimrodel gconfd (cer-5498): Exiting and this in /var/log/XFree86.0.log.old Fatal server error: Caught signal 11. Server aborting As you can see, I did not even loose my email session in Pine...] What was I saying... ah. I assume the kernel tried something, failed, logged it, and continued some other way. Similar to automount testing the floppy device and failing, because there is no floppy. Ugh. Well... I'm copying my root partitio [CRASH!] I was typing the above in a text console (I hoped to write it up before switching off), but it crashed on me, badly. I could not halt. So... this night I booted to runlevel 3, and copied my root partition to a new one of ext3 type. Changed the fstab and grub files, and rebooted. It's working so far, I'll try it out harder tomorrow. If it doesn't crash, then I'll leave it as ext3 and say goodbye to reiser. Meanwhile, I'll have to get the kernel patches using SuSE 7.3, because, as I reported in SLE, modem speed in 9.1 is below 1.5Kbytes per second :-( . I want to see if that was perchance solved, and if not, I'll try another distro with a 2.6 kernel. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson