Arch Linux

Jickel

Member

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 47

[SOLVED] Superblock has invalid ext3 journal after change of VMSPLIT

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum for this, but here goes..

I recently recompiled a custom kernel (toofishes' Eee kernel) which had NOHIGHMEM=y and VMSPLIT2G=y, enabling highmem and changing the split back to VMSPLIT3G. However, when it came to booting it, my login manager never popped up and instead I got a tty. Logging in gave me this output:

/bin/ls: /lib/librt.so.1: unsupported version 372 of Verdef record

and when I try to start X:

xauth: creating new authority file /home/jickel/.serverauth.1892

/usr/bin/X: error while loading shared libraries: libm.so.6: ELF load command alignment not page-aligned
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

Plus some segfaults when quitting. It seems I did not configure the new memory setting properly, though I did remember to change the CONFIG_PAGE_OFFSET_ VALUE at least.

Now when I try to boot using the default arch kernel to replace the faulty kernel, the file system check fails, and when I manually run fsck I get this question:

Superblock has an invalid ext3 journal (inode 8).
Clear<y>?

I'm still pretty new to Linux, but it seems the change of memory might have forced a change in the FS journal. No idea where to go from here though, and I that answering yes to the above might hose my FS. What do you suggest I do? I recently backed up my system, luckily.

Last edited by Jickel (2008-07-08 20:10:30)

toofishes

Developer

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-06-06

Posts: 602

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Superblock has invalid ext3 journal after change of VMSPLIT

Did you change the settings by manually editing the kernelconfig, or did you actually go into make menuconfig and figure out which options to change? I would ensure you didn't gum things up by doing it manually if that was the case.

If that isn't the issue, the VMSPLIT setting should not affect how your filesystem journal works- these are completely separate subsystems.

Jickel

Member

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] Superblock has invalid ext3 journal after change of VMSPLIT

I did it manually, I'll try doing it the other way later then. Thanks for the advice!

I guess those segfaults must have damaged the journals then. I'm still not sure how to repair this though.

UPDATE: Well I deleted the journal, had the file system repaired, and had a new journal created. The fsck command reports everything is fine now, but I still get the "FILE SYSTEM CHECK FAILED - Please repair manually and reboot" box-thingy when I try to reboot. Any idea how do progress from here? I need a working system to update the kernel back to a working one.

Oh, I found another thread where the OP has the same issue http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=385792 . I'll go through the solutions suggested there and see if anything works. No word on results in that thread though.

Last edited by Jickel (2008-07-08 05:37:44)

Jickel

Member

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] Superblock has invalid ext3 journal after change of VMSPLIT

Ok, I figured it out: I had to use the stock arch kernel to boot, and apparently it isn't capable of mounting file systems from the Eee's SD card directly at boot. This is where I have /home mounted, so fsck couldn't check all the file systems specified in fstab, resulting in an error. I edited fstab from its rescue console and rebooted so it wouldn't mount or check /home at all, then mounted it manually and updated my faulty kernel to a better one using pacman. Everything was OK after that.

It was its "Couldn't resolve UUID=.." output I got from making it more verbose by editing rc.sysinit as by toofishes advice in the original thread that helped me figure it out, so I guess that would be the best angle of attack for others with this problem. Thanks toofishes!

Last edited by Jickel (2008-07-08 20:08:16)