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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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 Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 6:21 pm Post subject: Dammit this stinks... |
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Oh screw it... It took me two months on and off to figure out how to install Gentoo, then I finally sucessfully install it, get video, audio and a few other cool things working and then 'blamo' while I'm doing a portage update and writing a letter to a friend, the whole sytem freezes up. I can't close any open windows, all the keys on my system are dead, the kmenu is non responsive, rightclick with my mouse doesn't work (although the mouse still moves), pretty much as I said, my whole system had frozen. So out of instinct - and since this had lasted a good 5 minures by then and didn't seem to be getting any better, I opted to reach for the recet switch on my PC. Big mistake.... Let me say that again that was a BIG MISTAKE! After reboot X was totally borked. If I did starx I got:
| Code: | | xauth error: while loading shared libraries libxmuu.so1 cannot open shared object file. No such file or directory. |
Then repeated again with xinit isntead of xauth. If I try to resolve the situation by doing an emerge -u system (indeed if I try to emerge anything) I get an error message saying:
| Code: | /usr/bin/emerge/:line1: omewhere: command not found.
/line2 is: command not found
/line3 have: command not found
/line4 syntax error near unexpected token 'C'
/line 4: ' for (this=0;thi<nent; this++)' |
From what I can see there it looks like a straightforward case of corruption. But that's the kicker; why all this corruption after one hard boot? I'm using Reiserfs so maybe that's a clue. I would never have used it if I had known it was prone to this kind of chronic corruption.
I suspect these fragments are only what I can see and are what is most obvious, but there is very probably a lot of corruption I can't see. I have to say after trying so hard and for so long to install gentoo and then finally succeeding I'm gutted that it was so easily broken.
Someone told me here not that long ago that I should always rememember that Linux is not Windows - and a complete reinstall is hardly ever required. I wonder is this one of those occasions? Is there a quick and simple way to get my system back on it's feet?
If not what is a good rock solid fast file system, preferably with some kind of ability to scan for and fix file system errors after a system crash, or as in my case a hard reboot? I know from experience that NTFS handles this sort of thing amazingly well - and rarely if ever causes data corruption. (Which is useful since Windows crashes so frequently). Some kind of equivalent in Linux would be cool.
I'm really not looking forward to another 48 hour Gentoo install - not at least unless I can be certain I won't have to go through something like this again.
All advice is very welcome.
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schism39401
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 13 Mar 2003
Posts: 130
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 6:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Could it have been hardware failure? I had a similar situation with my laptop. Worked great for about 3 weeks and then gentoo just started locking up and acting very funny. Tracked it down to bad sectors on my hard drive. I was running reiserfs as well and had most of the same symptoms you are having. Just a thought... |
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 6:56 pm Post subject: |
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No, like I said I pressed the hard reset button. I'm pretty sure that's what killed it, because in a previous (and wholly unrelated) failed attempt to install Gentoo I had to do the same thing (I didn't have X installed at that time though, so I can't tell if it would break again). But the exact same thing happend then, portage got screwed. I think its probably very predicable and repeatble... The first thing to get borked after a hard reboot of Gentoo with a reiserfs file system is always portage. I'd be willing to bet that X was the second thing, along with a bunch of other stuff too. If anybody out there is mad enough to try it on this, or any other file system, go ahaed and report the results. This file system shouldn't be recommended if it is so volotile and unsuitable for general use. (Maybe that's why Red Hat refuse to use it?)
It's not the harware, the drive is is a brand new WD 120 Gig drive that was fully checked for inconsistancies before I installed Gentoo.
The last failed install was on another drive (on another system completely) and that hard reboot killed portage too. I guess you could still say it's hardware, but it makes it less likely.
What did you do to fix yours? I'm guessing a reinstall? What FS are you using? |
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RedHerring
n00b
Joined: 28 Aug 2003
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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I don't use reiserfs, and I'm having my own troubles installing Gentoo, but I'd suggest booting from the LiveCD (or some other boot/rescue disk) and running reiserfsck on your filesystems....
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egthompson
n00b
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 39
Location: Somerville, AL
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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I run Reiserfs and never have had any major problems. My one-year old son likes to reset my machine daily...He likes to push the pretty green button (usually when I am ALMOST finished compiling a large program).  |
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schism39401
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 13 Mar 2003
Posts: 130
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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hmmm...I have used nothing but reiserfs for my / and /home and ext3 for boot since I start using linux. I have only seen my server hard lock once and had to reboot it. All it did was replay the journal and keep going. No errors or corruption at all. I have never had to reset my desktop so I don't know what would foul up if I did.....Kinda makes me want to hard reboot my desktop and see what happens. As far as my laptop goes I tried to reinstall gentoo, red hat, and mandrake and kept getting the same disk errors. However I put win2k on it and even tho it runs like crap..It gives me a backup till I can get a new HDD. Out of curiosty how do you have your partitions set up. Were they set up the same on both machines that failed. I am kinda grabbing at straws here  |
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 7:13 pm Post subject: |
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Well it's certainly predicable in my case, although reading around the forums I can see others have feel it to be very stable.
I don't know then. Two systems failing with the same problems? What could it mean?
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 7:24 pm Post subject: |
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@schism39401 I am so used to trying to get Gentoo running by now that I just choose the default Gentoo partitiong scheme by instinct; with : /boot 200MB EXT3 swap 517MB and root 31GB RFS.
My mobo is a KT400-A, so fairly recent. The other system was a KT400 (Via/Althlon) and set up identically.
Can someone please recommend a robust file system that isn't ever likely to give me these problems? I mean, sure Windows sucks - and sure it crashes all the time - and please don't doubt that I would love to move to linux full time. But I need something that is pretty unbreakable - and so far I haven't found that.
On the whole which file system is likely to suffer from the least potential for corruption and which one has the best ability to recover from system crashes. (If only Gentoo ran on NTFS...) I don't mind the lockups so much, but I can't trust files to an OS if they are likely to eventually become corrupt. Much of my data is too valuable for that.
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 8:05 pm Post subject: |
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Ok well I did reiserfsck and here is the results:
root@ttyp0[knoppix]# reiserfsck /dev/hdb3
<-------------reiserfsck, 2002------------->
reiserfsprogs 3.6.3
Will read-only check consistency of the filesystem on /dev/hdb3
Will put log info to 'stdout'
Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes] (note need to type Yes):Yes
###########
reiserfsck --check started at Thu Aug 28 20:55:35 2003
###########
Device /dev/hdb3 is mounted w/ write permissions, can not check it
root@ttyp0[knoppix]#
I tried unmounting the disk and mounting it read only (well I just removed the write permissions in SU mode from the disk icon on my desktop). and I tried mounting it in a different location with write permission. I get two similar errors. One is cannot replay jounrnal because disk appears to be mounted read only - and two is cannot check the disk because it is mounted in read/write mode. So it seems to be saying It can't check it properly if the disk is mounted read only, nor can it check it properly if it is mounted in RW mode. So can't do it with and can't do it without.... What is the deal with that? It seems in order to run this program my disks have to be 'undead', neither mounted nor unmounted.
I wish there was a version of Gentoo that was quick to set up, but wich then allowed me to just rebuild me world when time permitted. This is all far too time consuming.
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Last edited by raid517 on Fri Aug 29, 2003 4:24 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Brandy
Bodhisattva
Joined: 08 Jun 2003
Posts: 820
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 12:35 am Post subject: |
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Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
raid517, you can check the consistency of a reiser filesystem on a read-only mounted filesystem:
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reiserfsck --check /dev/hdb3
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This will return one of:
0 - no corruption
1 - corruption that can be fixed with --fix-fixable
2 - corruption that needs to be fixed with --rebuild-tree
If you need to fix the filesystem then it needs to be unmounted. If /dev/hdb3 is your root partition you'll most probably need to boot the Gentoo install CD. Then you can execute one of:
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reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hdb3
or
reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/hdb3
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The reiserfsck man-pages contain a lot of good info; they're well worth the read.
Ciao, Brandy.
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Lycander
Guru
Joined: 10 Apr 2003
Posts: 468
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:08 am Post subject: |
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My 2 cents.
Same exact thing started happening on my iBook, except when I hard reset it everything is back to normal, only to crash again in a few minutes.
What did I do prior to this happening? Recompiled my kernel with whatever that option is that lets me use /proc/cpufreq to control CPU throttling. Luckily I left my previous kernel in /boot under a diff name so I reverted to that and now all is well.
Might not be the same issue as yours. Have you tinkered with the kernel recently? Change any options relating to CPU or power management?
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szo
n00b
Joined: 20 Jul 2003
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 8:05 am Post subject: |
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Before rebuilding anything can you try stg like
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ldconfig --format=NEW /lib /usr/lib /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.1/ /usr/X11R6/lib/
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(replace the lib directories with your stuff, gcc may be different)
I was also having a very similar problem and "ldconfig" helped me. Of course before using it just check "ldconfig --help" to see what you are doing.
Care,
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 4:41 pm Post subject: |
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Well that is all very useful information. But what I would really like is a way to quickly back up a base Gentoo install (with X kde etc) so that I can quickly get back on my feet if something like this ever happens again. As I'm sure you guys will appreciate, reinstalling Gentoo is no joke.
Can that be done, or am I just dreaming? Lol if I were dreaming I would say being able to make a Ghost image of my Gentoo install would be cool. That would really save some time.
Anyway first class help as ever from you guys.
Thanks again.
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Lycander
Guru
Joined: 10 Apr 2003
Posts: 468
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 7:02 pm Post subject: |
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Installing Gentoo doesn't have to be that painful, use the GRP packages wherever possible. I say that because people claim there are certain packages missing which prevents us from getting Gnome up and running. I used mostly GRP packages on my iBook 800 MHz and compiled the ones that weren't on CD2. Took me roughly 3-4 hours of installing and configuring to have a fully functional Gentoo laptop. Of course, tweaking the little things for true comfort takes a few days.
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Janne Pikkarainen
Veteran
Joined: 29 Jul 2003
Posts: 1143
Location: Helsinki, Finland
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 10:14 pm Post subject: |
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| raid517 wrote: |
It's not the harware, the drive is is a brand new WD 120 Gig drive that was fully checked for inconsistancies before I installed Gentoo.
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Never say never... corruption could also happen with bad quality IDE cables or some DMA settings your motherboards IDE controller dislikes. |
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raid517
l33t
Joined: 06 Mar 2003
Posts: 946
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 7:45 am Post subject: |
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No I ran a full system test with WD's own propiatory disk checking utility (I forget the name now) and the drive came up clean/100% healthy with no bad sectors whatsoever.
Anyway, it matters not (at least for now) since I have since reinstalled Gentoo with an ext3 file system.
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