Arch Linux

miles969

Member

Registered: 2013-02-03

Posts: 23

/var partition seems to be corrupted

hi everyone,

not wanting to necrobump an ancient thread on this i thought i'd create a new post.
when i booted up today, i was greeted with quite a few failed entries in my bootsplash. gdm wouldn't run, but a login on tty2 worked. seems that my /var partition (seperate partition on sdb, / is on sda) is throwing i/o errors and is mounted read-only.

is there a way i can move all the files from sdb to sda (or another partition - hdd space shouldn't be a problem, i have plenty), and then change my fstab to reflect the new mountpoint? do i even need to copy the contents of /var or can i somehow just recreate the directory structure and point fstab to a different location?

in case its relevant, i also use deja dup to backup /var/pacman/cache to a seperate location (sdd i think). i may be able to recreate pacman's cache once i manage to mount /var somewhere that works.

im on a different system now and i have to go to work in a bit, so i can only post further details later today or tomorrow, but i'd be grateful for any tips or hints as to how to proceed here.

thanks a bunch!

regards,
M.

Gcool

Member

Registered: 2011-08-16

Posts: 1,456

Re: /var partition seems to be corrupted

You should be able to indeed copy the content of your /var partition to another (correctly functioning) disk/partition and simply update your /etc/fstab to point to the new partition.

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Burninate!

miles969

Member

Registered: 2013-02-03

Posts: 23

Re: /var partition seems to be corrupted

so... turns out i wasn't smart, fast or lucky enough. im able to boot and everything seems to work somewhat, but being that pacman's pretty useless without /var it seems i have to reinstall.
i only kept regular backups of /var/cache/pacman/ and the partition (i was trying out bcache with it, worked pretty well too) i saved it to seems to be acting up also.

is there anything particular i should be aware of when reinstalling? i'll make sure to back up / first, but i'm guessing i wont be needing it as i assume i'll be reinstalling everything from scratch.

does anyone else have experience reinstalling arch?

regards,
M.

Last edited by miles969 (2014-07-29 18:08:42)