Re: [PLUG] Debian unstable locking up and corrupting filesystem

["David B. van Balen" <dvb@temple.edu>]

Thanks for this, the system rescue cd was very useful. At the very least, I've been able to backup the latest data in my home directory, which was my biggest worry.

I'm not sure if the computer will successfully restart, but I'm starting
 to think I need a new hard drive... or maybe a new computer. It's about
 5-6 years old, which is 2-3 years less than I kept my last computer, 
but then the last one wasn't failing.

I'm a little weary of purchasing again from Compaq/HP, for obvious 
reasons, along with the fact that I had to wait a year after buying this one before a SATA driver for this disk (the one that's now 
failing) showed up in the Linux kernel. I'm also not necessarily sold on
 another Dell, like my previous one, although I'm also not against it. 
Does anyone have recommendations for a good, Linux friendly company I 
can purchase a desktop computer from? Also, any thoughts on AMD vs. 
Intel? I currently have a 64bit AMD, but am thinking of going multi-core
 32 bit for my next computer.

Anyway, back to the original topic, it looks like it's my boot partition with the issues. I was able to successfully run e2fsck on my data partition (where my home directory is) and backup my data. However, running it on my boot partition resulted in:

root@sysresccd /root % e2fsck -f -c -k -C 0 -p -v /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: recovering journal
Error reading block 24432 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read).

/dev/sda1: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY.
     (i.e., without -a or -p options)

Re-running without -p had me first ignore the error and then force a rewrite. After that there were various things:

- orphaned inodes (normal after a non-clean shutdown)
- another short read, this time for block 512046
- a couple multiply claimed blocks shared with 1 file, so I told it to clone the multiply-claimed blocks (I assume that could have good or bad consequences, depending on the details of the situation).
- The free blocks count was wrong for group #1 (93, counted=91) and group #15 (8894, counted=8896), both of which I told it to fix.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 11:56 AM, LeRoy <ldc@lrcressy.com> wrote:

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On 08/21/2011 09:02 AM, Casey Bralla wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday 20 August 2011 2:34:03 PM David B. van Balen wrote:
>> I've been having a recurring problem the past few weeks where my system will
>> suddenly lock up. If this happens while I'm at the computer, I'll be able
>> to move the mouse pointer around, but none of the apps will respond. If it
>> happens when I'm not around, I'll come back to a blank screen and the
>> computer won't respond at all. In all cases, there's nothing to do other
>> than a hard reboot, after which ext3 says it can't replay the journal and
>> I'll have various filesystem issues until I run an fsck. It happened again
>> yesterday, and now the system won't boot.After the grub menu, I get a bunch
>> of stuff like:
>>
>> [   13.720864] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
>> [   13.720905] ata1.00: error: {UNC }
>> [   13.744497] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, secdtor 195523
>>
>> followed by messages about not being able to mount /dev, /sys and /proc
>> because there's "No such file or directory" and I'll get dumped at a BusyBox
>> prompt (when I type "help" I don't see an option to run fsck, so I'll have
>> to see if I can figure out another way to run it).
>>

I would suggest that you boot using a System Rescue Cd
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page and do a e2fsck with -c which is a
bad blocks check on your Linux partitions.

If you are using ext3 try this:

e2fsck -f -c -k -C 0 -p -v /dev/sda?

This assumes that you are not using an external journal or bad blocks file.

Doing the bad blocks check will take some time depending on the
partition size, but I feel that you might want to do it.

- --
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