Arch Linux

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,358

Partition corruption (not physical) - due to Gnome?

Hi, a bit of lengthy background.

I use Arch 64-bit with awesomewm on my laptop with no problems. Two days ago I decided to also install Arch (32-bit) on my desktop workstation, partly to have fun with the new installer, partly to setup remote SSH access to backups, things like that. I set up the system and installed Gnome for ease of use (it would mainly be a console machine anyway) as well as VirtualBox to boot my existing WinXP install for work use. The problem (detailed below) started happening when I first set up my VM, and after some trial and error I found it would happen even without starting VirtualBox up. I then reformatted the partitions and reinstalled 64-bit Arch (easier because I already had cached packages from my laptop). Same symptoms. Previously both installs were ext4 for / and /home, I also tried replacing btrfs for / and /home, no difference. ONE time I got these symptoms for / (not /home) partition. Now I've installed XFCE and till now I can't replicate. At this point in time, / is btrfs and /home is ext4. If I go an hour without the problem I'm replacing /home with btrfs.

The problem:-
1. On starting Gnome up, everything works. I have full rw access to / and /home partitions
2. After some amount of time with some applications open, I start receiving error messages about the /home partition being mounted read-only
3. If I reboot after (2) happens, obviously there's fsck-ing needed. On ext4 the errors went something like "inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list were found". I couldn't execute btrfs-fsck when I tried it as a replacement for ext4, it never completed, though I neglected to take note of the error messages.

Last note - I started up gparted (with the current latest setup) to test the integrity of the hard disc, both brief and extended disc tests showed no errors (pre-failure and old age on some rows, but that's to be expected, this machine is maybe 3-5 years old).

Any suggestions on what may be the problem, or any PEBKAC to point out? I eventually want to use this machine as console-only with VirtualBox running headlessly so I can rdesktop in to the Windows install (which will also be running 100% of the time, auto-started at boot), so I don't really need a DE or whatever. I'm just surprised to be having such problems, honestly.

EDIT: update - just got the problem on XFCE as well, but only AFTER installing virtualbox and qt (for virtualbox's GUI). Too much of a coincidence I think... uninstalled both, now going to stress test the machine with other apps for a while

Last edited by ngoonee (2012-08-15 01:13:04)

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