Interesting fsck failure

[nickdalzell]

Never saw this happen before. i was playing a game (rigs of rods) on my Ubuntu laptop, you know, the one with the oddball fsck that sets errors everytime the system is shut down. well, the game started failing to save, after successfully saving three times prior in the same session, and i quit it and did some tests (knew what was going on, fsck had just set my filesystem read only during the game due to the dirty bit once again being set, but only twice during the X session had this happened) so, exiting and rebooting hoping to get a recovery prompt, i ran fsck /dev/sda1 as usual expecting to get the same half-hour wait that it normally takes to scan, repair, and turn loose my rw permissions again. this time, however, i was greeted by tons of jargon about 'INODE' errors. tons of 'em as it scanned, then at the end where it says 'FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED REBOOT LINUX' it self rebooted. i got the mouse momentarily before being dropped back to the scrolling and then-frozen kernel output, with the last line remarking 'Mountall: disconnected from plymouth' which just looped. i force-shut down the machine, tried again, but now the system was saying 'Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode' telling me that my video driver had died. i spent all night trying to find out why, only getting to the point where i could only revive X if i used software rendering only (gallium llvmpipe for the adapter). the funny part is that in root, everything worked fine. there was no Xorg.conf in /etc/X11, and no config file to be found. i never knew what root was getting its info from but not my user account. i tried deleting the .Xauthority file, manually creating a new Xorg.conf to force any mode, reinstalling the ATI driver, but no go. every so often fsck would rear its ugly head and throw a ton of INODE reference errors and files would then go missing. now it was unbootable outside the recovery console. irate, i just reinstalled Kubuntu in a new partition and am now in the process of manually copying everything over and reinstalling all my games. i got rigs of rods going, my progress back, and am putting the laptop away for a while. never seen fsck do this before, obviously as i type this on the same computer the hard disk is not dying, not reporting anything wrong. even fsck is behaving. its been a long day

 

[MoodyBlues]

I continually amazed at the problems you have! I've used *nix for more than a quarter of a century and haven't had as many problems in all that time as you have in, say, a month--and I'm including the large, multi-user systems I used to administer professionally. You, or your hardware, must be jinxed.

the funny part is that in root, everything worked fine.

The first thing I would've done is try logging in as a different user. Not necessarily root, just any other user to see if the problem(s) persisted. If they did, I'd move on to something else, but if they didn't, the problem most likely lies somewhere in your home directory, like a bad config file.

 

[nickdalzell]

the only config files were .Xauthority which was uneditable (produces garbage characters in gedit) and stuff not related to X. i think the original system was a bad install or a bad disc. it had had issues since day 1. when i installed Kubuntu on it and my mom's machine all those glitches went away. i am chocking it up to a bad image or ISO on my original disc. all the issues that plagued the official Ubuntu 12.10 seemed confined to that one particular system disc. now it's just a matter of getting everything like i had it. at least i didn't lose data, the partition still exists and i'm moving stuff over. although it would be a long time before i had everything as i had it. in this instance i am not blaming Linux. something was corrupt in that first install. it never worked right.

Kubuntu seems faster too. the game Rigs of Rods (a simulator/physics engine with endless editing features) even plays better in it. all the boot-time fsck issues are gone. in fact, i could force the machine off and fsck still ignores it.

 

[nickdalzell]

UPDATE: when i did a rundown of the old and new partitions in Gparted i found out my corrupted mess install was ext2 while the new Kubuntu is ext4. does ext2 not play well with SATA hard disks for some reason that i'm unaware of? also, using parts from a busted laptop i got my RAM now to 6GB from the original 4

 

[MoodyBlues]

UPDATE: when i did a rundown of the old and new partitions in Gparted i found out my corrupted mess install was ext2 while the new Kubuntu is ext4. does ext2 not play well with SATA hard disks for some reason that i'm unaware of?

Not that I know of. In fact, it wasn't that long ago that I finally switched from always using ext2 to now using ext3, and that definitely included SATA drives.

also, using parts from a busted laptop i got my RAM now to 6GB from the original 4

Good! I love re-purposing things, especially old computer parts.

 

[Speed Daemon]

does ext2 not play well with SATA hard disks for some reason that i'm unaware of?

The filesystem type and drive architecture are completely different things. There's no compatibility or incompatibility between them.

The ext2 filesystem is largely deprecated though. It has been replaced with journaling filesystems like ext4, ReiserFS, XFS or Btrfs. Although ext4 has superseded ext3, it's still in use a lot.

FYI you can upgrade an ext2 filesystem to journaling ext3 or 4 in-place, without having to reformat.

 

[nickdalzell]

all i know is in the original install it used ext2 and it never liked it. fsck even after a proper restart would always claim it was 'unclean' and do its little scan. sometimes, the system would be active, running, and then all of a sudden it goes read-only while live. then i force restart and it tells me it's got 'errors'. and needs to scan. it did this constantly. then after it was reported 'clean' and restarted it locked up. restart manually, unclean again. even if it were clean prior, proper shutdown would always claim it was mounted 'unclean'. this does not happen in the ext4 system that Kubuntu uses by default. somehow it seems to point to some incompatibility between my hard disk and the filesystem. that's the only possibility other than maybe a corrupted iso image to install from.

 

[Speed Daemon]

That's why we use journaling filesystems these days. They recover better from minor errors, and take less time to fsck on startup.

Note that Linux is based on UNIX, which was never designed to run on laptops. Although Linux now has power management and ACPI tools that are at least as good as those found in Windows and OSX, doing things like just closing the lid on a laptop isn't guaranteed to work perfectly on any OS.

Windows' NTFS is a journaling filesystem, as is HFS+ for OSX. IME with NTFS, lots of minor (and even some major) NTFS errors can accumulate on an always-on server style machine, and there will be no warnings. That's one reason why I always run CHKDSK to test the C: drive on the next reboot every time I restart Windows, and do frequent CHKDSK runs on NTFS filesystems that I can repair while Windows is running.

It only makes sense to choose a robust journaling filesystem for any Linux installation. And if Linux is running on a laptop or other device that's prone to sudden interruptions, I'd sure want the best journaling filesystem that I can get, and set its journaling properties for maximum data security.