Greetings all;
I got a rather unpleasant surprise this morning while rebooting to 2.6.26-rc8
The drive I use for amanda's virtual tapes is a 400GB Deathstar on a sata_sil
based pci card.
I didn't think too much of it when the bootup said it had been mounted 26 times,
check forced. So I knew I was in for a 30+ minute wait, but e2fsck normally
outputs about the first 24% of the check's progress on that particular drive
fairly quickly before entering a silent phase that may last 15+ minutes, then
resume, but do another long pause somewhere in the 80% finished area. These
pauses have been part of an e2fsck session since drives went above 40GB IIRC.
But this morning it just sat there without any drive activity or any sign that
it may have been working, but the keyboard was apparently alive, return keys
were getting a 1 line scroll. I let it sit for about 40 minutes while I made
preps to get to work on a garage attachment for our house. Then I then tried
several other kernels in the 2.6.26-rcx category, and all did the same, no
progress bar from e2fsck at all.
I was forced to reboot to a rescue disk and edit /etc/fstab to remove that drive
from the fstab list, then rebooted to 2.6.26-rc8 which was then normal, and I
was able to execute "e2fsck -C0 -p /dev/sdc1", and it ran as expected.
Re-enabling the entry in fstab, it wouldn't mount, IMO it should have, but did
on yet another reboot. All told, a simple reboot took well over 2.5 hours to
get back to a fully mounted, functioning system.
Catching some total newbie on something like this, and his answer will be to
reach for the windows install disks, never again to touch linux with a 20 foot
pole.
I have no idea what the problem is, but this needs moved to the top 5 on the
list of fixit's.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
George Orwell was an optimist.