fscked up beyond all recognition | Comments (3)
Posted in Linux/Unix on 23rd August 2005, 11:51 pm by Stuart
Strange things were afoot this evening when I switched on my laptop. Ubuntu did the intermittant “HAL could not be initialized” error first of all. A quick reboot and everything seemed ok for a couple of minutes. The update indicator was red so I though I ought to do a quick update. As that was processing suddenly it produced a nasty error stating that I needed to run “dpkg –configure -a” manually to set everything straight. Next the terminal wasn’t firing up so I thought I’ll just do a quick reboot.
As the shutdown was happening I saw lots of error messages about readonly filesystem which didn’t look good. Subsequently when I started everything up again the filesystem was screwed. An automated fsck failed and the error message said to run fsck manually without any switches. I logged in as root and ran fsck and then said yes to fixing everything it found. After this was finished I shut down and rebooted only to find that X died straight after login! I tried a few times but no joy so I then rebooted once more. This time everything was ok and I got into the desktop.
I then thought I’d go back to the updates as they were where the trouble had started. I tried to run the updater but I got the same error as before. I then opened up a terminal and ran “dpkg –configure -a”. Next I re-ran the updater and everything went fine. Finally I was back to stability.
The one thing I will say is that all of the messages the operating gave me regarding what was needed to be run manually was sound advice and eventually saved me further recovery attempts.
…you appreciate backups!
Just got myself a new Iomega RevDrive, which uses 35GB cartridges and is much faster than backing up to tape. Loving it so far, and the media is under 40 quid a pop.
That sounds like craziness. I wonder what happened. I’ve been running my Slackware box for five months straight, and nothing has happened.
@Nic – Yes back-ups are a very good idea. All my mail is IMAP so that’s handled (I also sync mail on my windows desktop too), and all the web files I work on are backed up on a USB hard drive, my windows box and the web server itself. Just to cover it!
@Christopher – It was craziness and I’d quite like to know what the cause was, I should check out the logs. Maybe the issue is hardware related as this laptop is getting on a bit!