On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 07:33:51PM +, clayton rollins wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> During a recent portupgrade, I got a hard crash of some sort...
> (I was out of the room, and the machine was sounding an alarm
> when I came back.)
>
> At any rate, portupgrade was probably altering the package
> database at the time of the crash, as I now get this error:
> pkg_info: the package info for package 'nvidia-driver-1.0.6113_1' is corrupt
>
> Needless to say, many of the other pkg tools won't work either.
>
> As for the nvidia pkg directory:
> >ls /var/db/pkg/nvidia-driver-1.0.6113_1/
> +REQUIRED_BY
> >cat /var/db/pkg/nvidia-driver-1.0.6113_1/+REQUIRED_BY
> kdemultimedia-xine_artsplugin-3.3.0
>
> Any suggestions? (If you want more info., just tell me what would
> be useful.)
Sounds like you've lost some of the contents of your /var partition.
Not knowing why your system went castors-up, there's two courses of
action to consider.
i) The system died because the disk is failing / about to fail.
In this case, what you need to do is try and avoid stressing the
failing components as much as possible. Your first objective should
be to get a backup copy of as much of your system as you need in order
to rebuild it successfully. The second objective is to get a new disk
drive.
If you get a list of all of the ports you have installed, together
with any build options you used, then re-installing that lot from
ports onto a new disk will sort out the corruption in /var/db/pkg
automatically.
ii) The system died because of bad memory, overheating, power
supply not able to keep up with demand, bugs in the OS or some other
reason not due to hard drive failure.
First, fix whatever it was that caused the system to bomb in the first
place. If you can't diagnose what exactly caused the problem, then
make sure you've got good backups, make sure that the box is
adequately ventilated (clean and dust out of the case, the PSU and any
filters; move the system away from obstructions to airflow) and watch
it closely when you run high-impact jobs like large compilations.
It's possible that it was the nvidia drivers themselves that caused
the system to crash. Depending on the precise make and model of your
motherboard and your graphics adaptor, you might have to experiment a
bit with the options for compiling the x11/nvidia-driver port and the
settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf -- using or not using the FreeBSD
agp(4) driver instead of the nvidia one seems to make the difference
in many cases. Note: if you're going to be de-installing and
re-installing the nvidia driver, it's best to do it *without* X
running.
Doing a forced re-install of any port where the /var/db/pkg directory
has become corrupted should fix the problems there. If portupgrade(1)
won't play ball, just do:
# cd /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver
# make install FORCE_PKG_REGISTER=yes
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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