first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

ristretto · 2007-10-13 09:25:05

I haven't been using ARCH for too long, only a few months. Came from Gentoo.
Did

pacman -Syu

thinking it would make sense to update.

After the update, which took quite a while, I tried to reboot. Didn't make it very far;
got a message that a superblock was bad, and "use e2fsck" to fix. I tried, no luck.

I was able to boot from CD, and mount the volumes: sda1, sda3, sda4. The data
was all there, and fine. So, I backed up /home and /var to a USB drive, then
restored the whole machine from a backup that was a few weeks old, but basically
other than /home and /var, not much different, but without the update.

System boots fine now.

Problem is I don't have time to work out what's going on. Does anyone have a good
explanation for this? I would like to be able to update my system. Is ARCH not a
very stable system for us users that are looking for a less needy distro?

kumico · 2007-10-13 10:45:41

without proper error messages i doubt you'll get much help ..
i know of similar errors coming from the kernel rather than the file system ...but can't begin to try and help without knowing where it came from.

tomk · 2007-10-13 11:16:16

The impression I get from your post is that you ran Arch for a few months with no updates, and then decided to do pacman -Syu. Am I correct?

If so, this is not the best way to handle your Arch system. It's not impossible, but the general recommendation is to update often. Regardless of when you update, always read the news items issued since your last update, so that you are prepared for any gotchas.

iphitus · 2007-10-13 12:55:24

Superblock issues though.... sounds like a possible hdd problem, or a freak bug/problem in ext3 -- they can't be caused by pacman/Arch.

James

ristretto · 2007-10-13 20:56:39

kumico wrote:

without proper error messages i doubt you'll get much help ..
i know of similar errors coming from the kernel rather than the file system ...but can't begin to try and help without knowing where it came from.

Sorry, I recovered my system before taking notes. But, it all started with this

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

******************* FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED *************
* Please repair manually and reboot. Note that the root *
* filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To remount *
* it read-write type: mount -n -o remount,rw /          *
* When you exit the mantenance shel the system will     *
* reboot automatically.                                 *
*********************************************************

Give root password for mantenance

I tried doing the suggestions there; I tried moving and fsck'ing the mounts
that way. There weren't any problems.

After restoring my system to the state it was in BEFORE the update, the
problem when away. This really leads me to think it's ARCH/Pacman related.

ristretto · 2007-10-13 20:58:52

tomk wrote:

The impression I get from your post is that you ran Arch for a few months with no updates, and then decided to do pacman -Syu. Am I correct?

Yes

tomk wrote:

If so, this is not the best way to handle your Arch system. It's not impossible, but the general recommendation is to update often. Regardless of when you update, always read the news items issued since your last update, so that you are prepared for any gotchas.

OK, thanks. I didn't see any news regarding -Syu causing this sort of problem. Did I miss something?

ProzacR · 2007-10-13 21:37:26

In the middle of update there are sometimes messages in this style:
#updating baba... [\]
!!!Do this and this!!! (ex. Copy something to somewhere)
#updating etc...
And if you make lots of updates at the same time you can miss that message.
~~
So here is my suggestion to create pacman logs function.

Last edited by ProzacR (2007-10-13 21:39:56)

byte · 2007-10-13 21:54:35

> So here is my suggestion to create pacman logs function.

/var/log/pacman.log?

Snowman · 2007-10-13 21:56:29

ProzacR wrote:

In the middle of update there are sometimes messages in this style:
#updating baba... [\]
!!!Do this and this!!! (ex. Copy something to somewhere)
#updating etc...
And if you make lots of updates at the same time you can miss that message.
~~
So here is my suggestion to create pacman logs function.

It already done. The post-install messages are logged in /var/log/pacman.log

fs4000 · 2007-11-01 23:52:12

Hello,
I'm using Arch for about 20 days and 3 times I got filesystem-errors after pacman -Syu.
The first time there were many multiply claimed blocks. I decided to check the drive with badblocks (hard drive was OK) and reinstall Arch.
But it didn't last long until it happened again. That time only two multiply claimed blocks. I reinstalled the destroyed files.
Since then I did pacman -Sy and pacman -Su separately and there were no problems.
Today I did pacman -Syu and there were two multiply claimed blocks again.
However it only happened if the package database was being updated.

Every time pacman -Syu caused the hard drive to work for at least one minute, although I decided not to install the updates, because the hard drive didn't stop working.
I think this must be a bug in the kernel.
My system is i686. I'm using one patition for everything (10 GB, 45% free).

I will never run pacman -Syu again!!!

mianka · 2007-11-02 16:51:24

That is weird.I update my computers with Arch (2 amd64,3 i686 portable and 1 PPC G4 portable) regularly and had never a problem.
So I think that,as Arch is a rolling distribution, one should update regularly (every day or two days) and do not forget to consult the Arch site.
So long.

fs4000 · 2007-11-03 00:04:42

I mean that I use pacman -Sy and pacman -Su separately.
Every time pacman -Syu updated the package databse, the filesystem (ext3) was corrupt.
I don't think it's the fault of pacman, but only this caused the problem.

budgenator · 2007-12-12 04:03:08

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

******************* FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED *************
* Please repair manually and reboot. Note that the root *
* filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To remount *
* it read-write type: mount -n -o remount,rw /          *
* When you exit the mantenance shel the system will     *
* reboot automatically.                                 *
*********************************************************

Give root password for mantenance

That is probably wrong, the default install formatting uses a larger block size (4K ),

-b superblock
Instead of using the normal superblock, use an alternative superblock specified by superblock. This option is normally used when the primary superblock has been corrupted. The location of the backup superblock is dependent on the filesystem's blocksize. For filesystems with 1k blocksizes, a backup superblock can be found at block 8193; for filesystems with 2k blocksizes, at block 16384; and for 4k blocksizes, at block 32768.

so the repair fails, I know i TOASTED my system following that advice and had to replace my 700MHz Athlon with 376 Mb of ram with a AMD64 doal core with 6Gb of RAM, running Vista at the moment but Arch x86-64 is wicked fast on it!

Susu · 2007-12-12 05:25:41

I had problems with ext3 and superblock errors too. I'd fsck'ed all partitions multiple times - no errors. I decided to backup data, formatted the whole drive, set up fresh partitions (also less partitions) and performed a fresh install (base iso 0.8.2). Same problem again after some boots. By now it seems to run stable but from what I read here, there are some serious bugs with the kernel and/or ext3.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-10-13 09:25:05

first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#2 2007-10-13 10:45:41

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#3 2007-10-13 11:16:16

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#4 2007-10-13 12:55:24

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#5 2007-10-13 20:56:39

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#6 2007-10-13 20:58:52

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#7 2007-10-13 21:37:26

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#8 2007-10-13 21:54:35

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#9 2007-10-13 21:56:29

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#10 2007-11-01 23:52:12

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#11 2007-11-02 16:51:24

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#12 2007-11-03 00:04:42

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#13 2007-12-12 04:03:08

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

#14 2007-12-12 05:25:41

Re: first time pacman -Syu, major problems, superblock blah blah

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