[PLUG] Bad shutdown and file system damage

Elliott Mitchell ehem at m5p.com
Mon Oct 11 15:26:02 UTC 2004


>From: Ovid <publiustemp-plug at yahoo.com>
> Yesterday, my FC2 box hung.  And hung.  And hung.  Nothing I did seemed
> to have any effect, even hitting the reset switch on the front.  I was
> eventually forced to hit the power switch.

Impressive managing to disable the reset button.

> When it rebooted, I opted for it to check my file system since I had an
> unclean shutdown, but when it told me I had problems (yeah, my mother
> says that, too) and dumped me to a command line, I didn't know what to
> do so I rebooted rather than risk damaging things further :(

Should of given you minimal instructions before that command line. Mainly
to run `fsck` by hand, though I guess you're not familiar with fsck.
Quite possibly most folks aren't. Unfortunatly rebooting, and continuing
to use the system could of made things a *lot* worse.

> I have my FC2 install disks that I can use for a boot disk, but I don't
> know what to do with those, either.  What can I do?  My file system is
> ext2.

Hmm, easiest approach to describe...  There are two reasonable options.
The first option is next time shutdown the machine with `shutdown -F`,
and that will force the invocation of fsck. From your description though
it will likely dump you back at the command line. So the second option of
going for the rescue disk may be best and get you to the command line
quicker.

Once at the command run `fsck -f -t <fstype> <device>` for each of your
filesystems. `fdisk -l /dev/hda` will likely list them for you. The other
option would be to mount your root filesystem READ-ONLY and get the list
from etc/fstab. Or if you remember all of your filesystem devices, that
will work too.

e2fsck is pretty good, and most of the time answering yes to its
questions is pretty safe; I'll have to recommend you do in fact answer
yes to all of them. Depending on the severity of the damage there is a
decent chance that fsck will dump files in the directory "lost+found" at
the root of each of the filesystem(s). You'll have to decide whether to
keep those or discard them.


>From: Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
> This smells to me like hardware trouble. Does memtest86 fail in 
> interesting way? Does your system have any builtin diagnostics? (Dells 
> often do.)

Dead wrong. It smells like precisely what the system said, filesystem
damage. Though this doesn't explain the original hang (but Fedora's
non-release status could).


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