On 3 March 2010 13:28, Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > > On 3 Mar 2010, at 12:42, Willie Wong wrote: > >> On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 12:24:42PM +0000, Stroller wrote: >>> >>> There seem to have been a few people posting with filesystem >>> corruption in the last week or two. It seems to be my turn, so I hope >>> it isn't contagious. The cause here is quite clear - whilst rummaging >>> in the server cupboard yesterday, power to the machine was >>> accidentally disconnected. >>> >>> I have booted with a live CD & run `reiserfsck --fix-fixable` on the >>> filesystem, but nevertheless when I attempt to boot the system I get a >>> "failed to open the device... no such file or directory" message, >>> followed by another error as per subject line. >> >> from the output it looks like you are mounting by label? What if you >> edit fstab to point to the device name /dev/hd?? instead of >> LABEL=root? Check the filesystem label to make sure it is ok? > > Many thanks for this suggestion, however following it makes no difference, > except in the trivia that it says "failed to open the device '/dev/hda3': No > such file or directory" (instead of "LABEL=..."). > > I also tried editing grub to point to /dev/sda3 (although admittedly with > the LABEL= entry in /etc/fstab) but that makes no difference. I have never > tried (intentionally) reconfiguring this kernel to use /dev/sdX instead of > /dev/hdX and I'm pretty sure it's booted using the current kernel & > configuration in the past.
In my experience reiserfs is a very stable fs. I had a dodgy memory module once which I put up with for more than 9 months. The machine would lock up hard on a daily basis and the only way to get it going again would be to pull the plug. That would happen at random, midstream emerge --sync, package updates, updatedb, etc. It survived through hundreds of crashes by fsck at the next boot. Once or twice things went hairy and I would get a message similar to yours. On these rare occasions I booted with a LiveCD and with the partitions unmounted I ran --check, then --fix-fixable and finally --rebuild-tree. You may want to use an external drive with dd to image the current / partition and do all your recovery work on that. If you don't care too much about the risk of catastrophic failure then just run --rebuild-tree with a LiveCD and see what you get. Good luck. -- Regards, Mick
