[SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

hanckmann · 2009-08-15 08:22:54

I use an fully updated arch on eeepc900 (ssd harddisk).
It is partitioned with 3 partitions and all are ext3:
/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 /
/dev/sda3 /home

After the installation I managed to boot a few times without a problem. Then, the boot process fails, telling me that it cannot mound sda2 due to a superblock error. I can go into maintainers-mode.
After the root login, I did fsck (with and withourt force option and alternative superblock). It cannot find any problems.

At some point I disabled the boot check in /etc/fstab. Now it boots, but it fails mount sda1 and sda3. This time also a login screen appears. Then I can login as root and mount sda3 manually without a problem. After a logout, I cannot login as user and start my xorg.

This procedure is not very safe (no fs check at boot) and not convenient (extra typing involved and no gdm). I already did a reinstall and exactly the same happened.

What is going wrong? How can I solve this?

PS. If you need additional info then I can past it later!

Last edited by hanckmann (2009-08-19 13:08:03)

djszapi · 2009-08-15 14:39:53

Welcome to the forum, hanckmann!

Didn't you create swap partition ?
What's the output of your fdisk -l in root mode ? Is your menu.lst is good ? What was changed between the working and non-working boot ? Did you try with other filesystems too ?

hanckmann · 2009-08-15 18:26:30

Thanks.. well, as I have a lot of memory and only a small SSD harddisk, I decided to not use a swap partition. I am sure I will be fine :-)

Anyway, about the issue I talked before. It seems that the problem is in the specific kernel-eee (see http://code.toofishes.net/packages/eee/). I am also now in toucht with the developer of this kernel version (he is very responsive!).

Anyway, maybe it is good if others have a think about it as well. Maybe Dan (kernel-eee developper) can also join in.

fdisk -l tells me what I expect it to tell me. The size of the disk (16G), 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1962 cylinders
Some extra info and then my 3 partitions with the respective (and correct) info. The output shows nothing strange (maybe I can post it later... now it is on the not working machine).

My menu.lst is good. I know this because the eeepc sometimes manages to boot up correctly.

I also tried it with ext4. First I thought that ext4 was the problem. Therefore I did the reinstall and formatted everything as ext3.

For now I will wait for Dan's input. He would try to see if the problem is indeed in the kernel-eee package. If it is, then (I guess) it will be updated. Of course, I will check back and post the result.

Thanks for your comment btw.

djszapi · 2009-08-15 21:35:20

Did you experience such a problem earlier or just with this kernel-eee package ?

Profjim · 2009-08-16 00:36:03

I was having somewhat similar problems on a recent Arch install. Main machine is a Mac Mini, whose drive used their EFI partition table. But using standard tools for dual-booting Macs, I was able also to boot from the Arch install on that machine's drive. My problems were all coming from an external drive attached to these. Spent a few frustrating days with this. I thought the problem was from the flaky support for mounting the external drive in OS X. Had ext3 on that drive, then downgraded it to ext2, then finally gave up, figured trying to mount this drive in OS X was not worth it. (And it's a big drive that I'm going to want to be in ext3/ext4 eventually.) So I just reformatted that whole external drive, and set it up for use solely within Arch.

But hey, I continued seeing this kind of problem. Bad superblock and so on. But now the drive had been completely reformatted, new partitition table and everything, and OS X hadn't touched it. So that probably didn't have anything to do with my problem.

Running fsck by hand would report no errors, no matter which flags I gave to fsck. If I ran it using one of the "backup" superblocks, though, I usually did see some errors, which fsck corrected. (Would that be because the backup superblock was out-of-date? Just guessing.)

Was finally able to fix this, and keep my boot-time disk checks, by adding a block like this to my /etc/rc.sysinit:

TIMEOUT=0
while [ ! -b /dev/sdb1 -a $TIMEOUT -lt 10 ]; do sleep 1; let TIMEOUT++; done

This is going by memory, I seem to have accidentally overwritten my mods by re-installing initscripts. But I added the block somewhere just before the fsck. And I found that this delay was enough to let me boot flawlessly. fsck checks always passing.

Worth a try...

Last edited by Profjim (2009-08-16 00:38:17)

hanckmann · 2009-08-18 20:05:04

It seems that the issue I had was with the kerneleee package. The maintainer has updated the package and all works (at least it seems).

Personally I do not know what the problem was with the kernel version.

I think this thread can be closed.

Thank you all for helping (esp. the package maintainer)!

http://code.toofishes.net/cgit/?p=about

Profjim · 2009-08-19 01:05:16

To close a thread, edit your first message and add [SOLVED] to the title.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-15 08:22:54

[SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#2 2009-08-15 14:39:53

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#3 2009-08-15 18:26:30

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#4 2009-08-15 21:35:20

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#5 2009-08-16 00:36:03

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#6 2009-08-18 20:05:04

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

#7 2009-08-19 01:05:16

Re: [SOLVED] Mounting fails at boottime

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