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siell

Member

Registered: 2009-09-05

Posts: 6

SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

My system started failing a few days ago because of sudden Input/Output errors when trying to access certain files. It was running fine until various applications started crashing like for example Pidgin (in retrospect probably because of DBus crashing). I decided to reboot and now can't login anymore because the DBus module fails to load which in turn means that HAL doesn't load either and so I can't use my keyboard to login.

The error message I get from DBus is that it can't access the file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.PolicyKit.conf because of an Input/Output error. I tried to fix/see what was wrong using the arch livecd. Because I thought my problem had to do with a pacman update that had failed before I'd rebooted, I updated my system and I noticed that when pacman tried to access other files it came back with the same error message. The files seemed pretty random, one of them was fakeroot.conf and then several library files like libfaad (sorry this is kind of vague but I'm away from home right now and can't go online very often so I'm writing this from memory).

I'm guessing its a hard drive problem because checking the filesystem for errors came back with nothing. I was just wondering whether anyone had any other ideas before I go and reinstall. I'm going back home tomorrow so I'll be able to follow any advice/reinstall then.

Last edited by siell (2010-04-08 17:01:37)

Mektub

Member

From: Lisbon /Portugal

Registered: 2008-01-02

Posts: 647

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

siell,

one possibility is that a partition runned out of space.

Mektub

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pyther

Member

Registered: 2008-01-21

Posts: 1,395

Website

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

I would think it would be rather odd for it to be a hard drive problem considering the filesystem came back clean.

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siell

Member

Registered: 2009-09-05

Posts: 6

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

Mektub: Hmm, I don't think it did but I'll check. If that's true, I guess the only thing I can do is reinstall and make it bigger this time?

pyther: Oh yeah, you're right, that was me being stupid. I now remember I only checked it with e2fsck but not specifically for bad blocks, does that make sense?

Thanks for your replies!

Mektub

Member

From: Lisbon /Portugal

Registered: 2008-01-02

Posts: 647

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

Mektub: Hmm, I don't think it did but I'll check. If that's true, I guess the only thing I can do is reinstall and make it bigger this time?

No, not necessarily. First you can always delete some temporary files or move some data to other partition.

And with the gparted livecd it is possible to re-dimension partitions without losing data.

Mektub

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siell

Member

Registered: 2009-09-05

Posts: 6

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

Oh yes true, I think I might still have that livecd somewhere actually. I'll look into the size issue as soon as I'm done with e2fsck. I'm having it check for bad blocks and on the first run through it found quite a lot of bad inodes. It's on its second run now, should take another 40 mins.

siell

Member

Registered: 2009-09-05

Posts: 6

Re: SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

UPDATE

It seems to be fixed! The second run of e2fsck fixed some more issues and the files that were causing the problems earlier seemed to have bad inodes. Boots fine now and I can get into my system. I checked and I still have a reasonable amount of free space so I don't think that was the reason ... I have no idea how the filesystem got so corrupted out of nowhere.

A few things are different, for example, it asked me to unlock the keyring and I couldn't mount my external encrypted drive anymore and had to do it manually with cryptsetup. e2fsck made quite a few changes so I imagine it's due to that. Shouldn't be to hard to fix though.

Thanks for your help!