Reiserfs - lost all my servers

AA6QN · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2008 Posts: 10

After no hickups for many months, all my servers quit within 2 days last weekend. The problem is that the grub boot does no recognize the root partition which just happens to be reiserfs on all. I mounted one of the server harddrives and ran reiserfsck --check on the partition and it looked ok. I then ran reiserfsck and scanned the whole disk and rebuilt the tree and thousands of corrections were made. (about 7k worth). Still no bueno.

All the platforms boot to a point where its looking for the root /dev/sda3 which it never see's and I get the dreaded D to continue or root password for maintenance.

What happened in the last few days, update wise, that could of caused this? These are headless SBC's that are a pain to rebuild. Hopefully someone has a clue.

Down hard!

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

Had you just upgraded your kernel? If so, are you sure you turned on support for reiserfs in the kernel?

If that's not it, it might be helpful if you provided the actual error messages GRUB is giving you.

Also, I'm confused about something: if the servers won't boot, then how did you mount one of the servers' hard drives? Did you boot from a CD? Did you use GRUB but boot from an old kernel? Did you boot from GRUB with the current kernel using a manually-entered bootline?

idella4 · Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2010 9:16 am Post subject:

who so dreaded? Log into the shell and see what it shows. First I would do is ls /dev/sd* to see what devices are made, then check the status of the reiserfs in the system. As the other poster said, what does the boot eror message cite?
The last time that happened with reiserfs, the fsck trashed the system, but if you get to where you've git, then that could not have happened.
_________________
idella4@aus

AA6QN · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2008 Posts: 10

Well, Dreaded, means something is wrong. Yes, its a good thing.

Still have not discovered why all the servers reiserfs root files systems are no longer accessible at boot up. I wish I had the time to research but I do not.

I did read about a Kernel, udev bug that related to a similar problem and tried to down grade to udev-149. Did not fix the problem.

With that said, I removed the drive from the SBC (Soekris Net-5501) and put it in a pc which allows me to mount with a CD. Backed up the important stuff and rebuild the system with ext3 root file system. Basically, I gave up on reiserfs after all these years.

The rebuild is going well, one step at a time, and I will clone the drive for the other servers once completed to save time.

Thank you for your comments

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2010 12:42 pm Post subject:

AA6QN,

Please rebuild your kernel with

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

Neddy_Seagoon is better than the Oracle of Delphi.

You can quickly check to see if that's enabled like so:

AA6QN · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2008 Posts: 10

I just read this and the light came on:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/missing-dev-sda-etc-when-booting-custom-kernels-793583/

Yes, everything died right after a world update and udev-151 got me.

I believe that you guys are spot on

Thank you, more work to undo