My /lib/rcscripts/* gets corrupted on a pretty regular basis. I am forced to re-emerge baselayout after pretty much every 2 or 3 reboots. This started happening maybe 2-4 weeks ago. At first I thought it was a one-time anomoly but it has happened 3 or 4 times now. I thought maybe it was/is a bad hard drive but I have had no error messages indicating disk problems. I believe the problem is reiserfs. When the problem occurs, I can still log in at the console, but none of the services have started since the files in /lib/rcscripts are busted. Since those files get touched/used during the shutdown process, I wonder if they are not somehow getting corrupted because they are still in use or open when the system actually stops. I really have no idea, that is just a suspicion. dmesg shows a bunch of reiserfs related errors, typically "invalid format found in block" at which point it trys to fsck the file but that gets a "i/o failure occured trying to find stat data of [blah blah]". There is nothing in the logs. I get "permission denied" if I try to ls -l the files. Usually re-emerging baselayout fixes the problem, only this time, while re-emerging baselayout, I am actually getting a "permission denied" message while emerge tries to copy the files from /var to /lib. Only it is not consistent. I re-emerged 3 times. On the first two tries I got "permission denied" while copying a file from /var to /lib, but on the third try it completed successfully. See the URL for some script output. Assuming it is a problem with my reiserfs filesystem, would it be safe to move to ext3 using the following procedure? 1. boot from the livecd 2. mount /, mount another partition >= the size of / 3. copy everything from / to the other partition 4. reformat / as ext3 5. copy everything back 6. adjust my fstab and reboot What should I use for the copy? Just cp? Mark Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. 'emerge info' here: http://mark.gangwarily.ca/tess-info.txt
I just re-emerged baselayout again, and immediatly after reboot I got the same errors. My /lib/rcscripts is munged again. The problem seems to be getting worse. An "ls /lib/rcscripts" works, but an "ls -l /lib/rcscripts" gets me "permission denied" for each subdirectly and file in /lib/rcscripts". I ran the following commands in this order and trapped their output in the indicated file: http://mark.gangwarily.ca/more-rcscripts.txt # ls /lib/rcscripts # ls -l /lib/rcscripts # dmesg # emerge baselayout (returns "gawk too old" per this bug: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20835) # emerge baselayout (same result) # shutdown -r now Then I rebooted, and despite the presumably still broken /lib/rcscripts, the bloody thing booted just fine, no errors. This thing is fscked. Mark
Alright. Sorry all but I am not going to waste time trying to fix this. I need my machine back ASAP. I've backed up my /home and I am going to start a re-install and use ext3 everywhere. Mark
For copying a whole fs, you can do: # cp -ax ....
Closing.
