Arch Linux

vexxor

Member

Registered: 2008-07-17

Posts: 45

[SOLVED] Filesystem check failed - All seems normal

Yesterday i turned of my computer after it had been on for a week or so and this morning i can't get it to boot.

While booting, on the filesystem check stage, it reports all filesystems as clean, but then says [FAIL], and gives me access to the maintenance shell.

- I booted the system with a Gparted live cd and did a check on all partitions on all disks. It reported no errors.
- in fstab I commented out the external disk and the internal one which doesn't contain any system partitions, still the same.
- I remounted root rw in the maintainance shell, and did a full system upgrade (last kernel upgrade was applied) ... still no cookies...
- I also tried to mount all the partitions in the maintenance shell. All were mounted without an error, and as far as i can tell all data was there and browsable at least.
- I tried to boot with a /forcefsck file and the checks were all done without any messages, after which it failed as usual.

Also i tried fallback (before the upgrade), which as you can guess by now, also gave the same error. The message about the filesystem check failing is not giving me any useful information. All it does is list the partitions saying every partition is clean, and then says the filesystem check has failed.

As you can probably tell, I did all the steps I could find on the forums that looked it could solve my problems, and I've hit a dead end. If I knew which partition had the problem  I could move the data and format it. Could this be a hardware error?

Thanks in advance for any help offered

Last edited by vexxor (2009-07-28 11:04:02)

KimTjik

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-08-22

Posts: 715

Re: [SOLVED] Filesystem check failed - All seems normal

Maybe a stupid question, but it's not that some partition is totally full?

vexxor

Member

Registered: 2008-07-17

Posts: 45

Re: [SOLVED] Filesystem check failed - All seems normal

Maybe a stupid question, but it's not that some partition is totally full?

Nope. I just checked.

Funny thing. In the maintenance console, when i do a "mount -a", I can navigate to the now mounted directories, but I can't see the mounted partitions as an output of either "mount" or "df".
I figured this out when I was checking if the disks were full. Root gets shown, and its on 53%. Just in case i deleted about 20GB of stuff from the media partition, but the problem remains.

vexxor

Member

Registered: 2008-07-17

Posts: 45

Re: [SOLVED] Filesystem check failed - All seems normal

Worked it out. Seemed to be the external disk i plugged out as my first response to the problem. Beats me why it kept failing for a non connected disk. I forgot to comment it out in fstab. After i commented it out, the system booted. After that i just needed to run fsck on it and the problem was solved.

fanta

Member

Registered: 2009-09-01

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Filesystem check failed - All seems normal

I had this same issue.
Cleaning up fstab made no difference.

Instead, I discovered that I had residual /mnt/usb[1-6] directories and apparently HAL was remounting my partitions. /dev/sda1 was being mounted as /mnt/usb1 rather than /boot, etc. Deleting the /mnt/usb* dirs resolved boot time error.