Re: dist-upgrad removed packages
On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 01:01:46AM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> > I ran aptitude dist-upgrade and was using mozilla at the same time.
> > Mozilla vanished off the screen and then I noticed an error from
> > aptitude in the xterm window. Then the my CPU monitor went to 100%
> > and the system would not respond.
> >
> > I never had that happen before.
>
> That sounds like some glitch happened such as filling up your disk to
> 100% which caused cascade failures.
This laptop has only one partition. (Well, the other 8GB isn't
mounted right now.)
moseley@laptop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda4 12G 9.7G 2.0G 84% /
which is after downloading all the new packages. Not a lot of free
space, but seems like enough.
> > bash: /bin/ls : Input/ouptut error
>
> Because of the spelling error I assume you typed that in instead of
> cutting and pasting.
I couldn't cut-n-paste because the machine is unusable at that point.
> But if 'ls' is reporting an I/O error that does
> not bode well. Check your /var/log/syslog for errors. You may have a
> disk drive crash. I/O errors usually means a drive gone bad. Which
> would make sense during an upgrade because you would be touching disk
> blocks that you would not normally touch. Those blocks may have been
> bad for a while and you would not have noticed until you tried to read
> and modify them.
Well, I was going to argue against a disk failure. For one thing I
can't find anything unusual in any of my logs. Second, the laptop seems
to work fine -- except when I try and run apt-get or aptitude and it
finally locks up with the Input/output error message. I'm using the
laptop now -- and it's running quite a bit and just finished running
the daily updatedb to stressed the hard drive quite a bit.
But, when I first booted this morning and started mutt and read your
mail I went to look at logs again and didn't see anything odd, but it
did finally lockup with that Input/output error for every command I
tried to use. So maybe the disk is failing so fast that there's no
time to write to the disk.
Still, that doesn't make sense. I can consistently make it fail by
running apt-get and aptitude, but otherwise the laptop boots and
seems to work ok (except for that first boot this morning).
I'm living on borrowed time with this laptop, regardless.
> I would boot off of a live cdrom such as a knoppix disk. Then you
> could run diagnostics against the disk. If you are getting I/O errors
> then I would make sure you have all of the data you need off of the
> disk while you still can. Some drives work in that mode with bad
> blocks for a long time. Others die off very quickly. It is hard to
> predict. (I should take a picture of a big stack of dead drives next
> to my desk from years of collecting them.)
Yes, maybe time for a clean install and a new drive. I wonder if
knoppix has the smartmontools installed (and if this drive will work
with SMART). I've been meaning to play with SMART for a while.
> Good luck!
Thanks, looks like I'll need it.
--
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org
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