Re: Unmounting (during shutdown) then mounting (during bootup) USB-attached external hard drive fails fsck
Hi everyone
The problem appears to have been a race condition between udev and fsck.
I clued in to this possibility when I was about to issue the
fsck.ext3 -v -y -b 32768 /dev/sdb6
command of my original posting. Before I could issue this, there was a
console message from udev saying that sdb was now available.
So, I checked in /etc/fstab and discovered that the last column, the one
which specifies the order in which fsck is to be run on various devices,
specified 2 for /dev/sdb6, the same as for all of the partitions on
/dev/sda. When I changed that 2 to a 3, the problem went away.
Regards
Jack
Jack Warkentin wrote:
Hi
I have a USB-attached external hard drive with an ext3 partition that
was working very successfully for 18 months with a Pentium-4 3.0 GH
processor. That motherboard failed and last November I bought an AMD64
motherboard as a replacement. Now, frequently, but not 100% of the time,
after I have shutdown the system and then rebooted, that partition fails
the bootup fsck and I am put into single user mode. The error message
indicates that fsck can't find the superblock and suggests running fsck
manually specifying an alternate superblock. When I then issue the command
fsck.ext3 -v -y -b 32768 /dev/sdb6
a bunch of errors are found (and fixed) during the last pass. After
exiting single user mode the system boots successfully and sdb6
functions normally.
Are there any suggestions for preventing these occurrences? I can
provide as much detail about the system as necessary, just let me know
what is required. Unfortunately, the console display during the relevant
part of the bootup is not captured in any of the log files. Is there any
method of capturing these?
Any help would be appreciated.
Jack
--
Jack Warkentin, phone 902-404-0457, email jwark@eastlink.ca
39 Inverness Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3P 1X6
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