Arch Linux

jnharris

Member

Registered: 2011-01-03

Posts: 3

File system failure

First of all I apologize if I have overlooked a previous thread.

Two weeks ago I began having problems with my computer screen (laptop) dimming.  Thinking that this was a fluke I rebooted.  The computer failed to shut down and I had to do a reset.  Then it would not boot.  Since I had saved my "home" to a sepperate partition I did a reinstall but it would not read my home partition.  I then tried "e2fsck -f".  It worked perfectly.  All is well.

Untill last night.  Last night the exact same thing happened again.  The screen began to dim uncontrollably.  So I tried a reboot.  Failed again.  Reset.  Again it would not boot.  This time I had the foresight to have a live disk available.  I ran "e2fsck -f" from the live disk and all is well.  It took about 30 minutes to fix all of the errors but everything is fixed.

I am running a current install of Arch on a dell latitude 610.  2 gigs of ram 40 gig HD.  I am using a ext4 file system on both my / and /home partitions.  I think that I am having a hardware problem but this only started after installing Arch.  Could be because I am using ext4. 

My assumption (from the wiki) is that I have a two fold problem.  First of all the shut down failure due to a ram problem.  Then a ext4 failure due to the reset.  I am only guessing here.  Thank you in advance for your help.

Mektub

Member

From: Lisbon /Portugal

Registered: 2008-01-02

Posts: 647

Re: File system failure

jnharris,

I would do two things:

Test memory with memtest. It does work, I did use it. You can download it from http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

What concerns ext4, use noddelalloc while mounting: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1115098&page=3

Mektub

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jnharris

Member

Registered: 2011-01-03

Posts: 3

Re: File system failure

That makes a lot of since.  I am still learning how to ask to right questions in the search bar to find the right answers to this stuff.  Thank you for the info I will give both of these a try.  Both times that I had this problem it was only one file that was corrupted in the process, so the "nodelalloc" seems like the trick I was looking for.  I do not understand why that would make the drive un-mountable. Thanks again.