Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

liquibyte · 2014-12-24 17:44:17

Ever since the systemd decision my computer locks up at least once a day requiring a reboot. I live with it because there's nothing I can do to fix it. Today I was doing an upgrade and it locked up during and now I don't have a /dev/sda2 which is /. The partition /dev/sda1 is /boot and is unaffected. Trying to fsck gets me nothing but "e2fsck: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda2". I try and discover alternate superblocks on /dev/sda2 and "dumpe2fs: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda2" is the result. If I do it on /dev/sda1, I get valid superblocks

Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-15
  Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32783
  Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98319
  Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163855
  Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229391
  Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-294927
  Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819215
  Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884751
  Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1605647
  Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654223
  Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096015
  Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7962639
  Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239439
  Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480015
  Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23887887

Doing an fsck on /dev/sda1 returns all kinds of fun fixes that never seem to take as they reappear if I run it again. So basically /dev/sda2 is sitting there as if it's unpartitioned. I can't mount it to chroot and I can't fix it because whatever live disk I'm working on thinks it doesn't exist. Am I at this point goint to have to reformat and install once again or is there perhaps something else I should be doing to try and recover?

alphaniner · 2014-12-24 18:00:15

Does sda2 actually exist according to fdisk? If not, and you know its 'geometry', just re-create it.

But it seems unlikely that a lockup/reboot would cause partition table corruption. Have you ruled out hardware issues (tested HDD, swapped SATA/PATA port & cable)?

liquibyte · 2014-12-24 18:43:16

alphaniner wrote:

Does sda2 actually exist according to fdisk? If not, and you know its 'geometry', just re-create it.
But it seems unlikely that a lockup/reboot would cause partition table corruption. Have you ruled out hardware issues (tested HDD, swapped SATA/PATA port & cable)?

No, according to fdisk, sda2 doesn't exist. I'm on my second hard drive after the systemd thing and have been experiencing these lockups ever since the switch and I'm fairly sure something associated with systemd is what's causing the lockups and I'm starting to think it's trashing my drives. My last disk died in an eerily similar fashion. The last drive failure I had, I checked all of my hardware for issues and found none. As far as the geometry goes, I'm not sure but I'll do some research to see if I can recreate it. If things are gone for good, so will I be. I've been considering going back to slackware because they don't use systemd. If I could run Arch without it, I would be happy but the decision's been made and apparently there's not much we can do about it. I certainly didn't appreciate being forced into the change myself.

jasonwryan · 2014-12-24 19:28:49

There is no evidence that systemd is responsible for this; I agree with alphaniner, this sounds much more like a hardware fault.

In any event: please post the pacman log and journal for the the period immediately preceding the catastrophic event.

liquibyte · 2014-12-26 01:04:37

There is every bit of evidence that systemd is causing the lockups, i.e. they never happened before and have happened every day since but don't at all if I use a distro from before the massive migration to it.

As for your second comment, that would be rather hard for me to post since the partition is gone, entirely. I solved this by going back to Slackware which doesn't use this software. It's a shame because Arch was really good before the adoption of this stuff. I have a feeling that it may be an unlucky combination of things I'm running and I honestly don't have the time to be debugging things that I'm not responsible for. If I'm wrong then even with my migration to Slackware I should start experiencing the lockups today or tomorrow. I've been running all day without any issues so far so my suspicion is that the software or combination of software with it is trashing the drive in some fashion leading to eventual faillure. My hardware is fine, it's been checked.

fsckd · 2014-12-26 01:09:09

FYI, you can run Arch without systemd. There are threads in this forum on that. However I doubt it would solve your issue. The difference between Arch and Slackware is much greater than systemd.

yetanothergeek · 2014-12-31 17:08:30

How are you specifying the device name in /etc/fstab ?
If you have more than one drive, you might need to use a LABEL= or UUID= instead of calling it /dev/sda2
See:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/pe … ice_naming

Arch Linux

#1 2014-12-24 17:44:17

Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#2 2014-12-24 18:00:15

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#3 2014-12-24 18:43:16

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#4 2014-12-24 19:28:49

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#5 2014-12-26 01:04:37

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#6 2014-12-26 01:09:09

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

#7 2014-12-31 17:08:30

Re: Partition gone after lockup during upgrade

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