frequent segfaults on fsck at boot (ext2 fs)
I have been having alot of trouble with one of our machines, a K7 on a K7V133 motherboard, with an LVD 10,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah on an adaptec 19160 LVD controller. Upon almost every boot, at least one of the four partitions on /dev/sda will balk at fsck, forcing me to run e2fsck as root before resuming the boot process. A number of complex problems have been experienced; I would like to ask for some suggestions as to where to seek information that might help lead to identification and resolution of the underlying problem. I am not quite sure where to seek information or assistance on troubleshooting hardware problems through GNU/Linux boot messages.
I had similar problems (segfaulting of e2fsck over and over until a fs was unuseable). I removed one of the two DIMM memory modules; the problem had seemed to resolve when Debian potato was reinstalled, and upgraded through up-to-date sid. Indeed, Matrox G450 dual headed configuration worked fine.
But all along, there have been little inexplicable segfaults, using apt-get or dpkg, and other times. OFTEN the dpkg config files, either /var/lib/dpkg/status or /var/lib/dpkg/available would be corrupted. I wonder whether this results after extensive, repeated fscks. I have had to edit these files by hand, removing upper ASCII chars.
Eventually, I changed over to the other memory module, and again, things seemed fine. For a while. Although I had the usual (or, in this case, I suppose I ought to say extraordinary) "unstable" instabilities. I've had a lot of galeon segfaults, and netscape started freezing up. I can't say anything about why. However, the need to restart the system without shutting down leads again to multiple e2fscks and perhaps further rotting of the filesystems.
At this point I suspect a SCSI HDD or adapter problem. I added the second memory mod back in. I cannot say anything has improved.
One characteristic problem, that has started to recur, is segfaults during e2fscks with extensive error messages including register dumps. Dpkg and apt-get also segfault.
I plan to upgrade to the ext3 fs, to hopefully get around the need for so many fscks. However, I cannot get linux-2.4.13.tar.gz cleanly onto my machine using wget, after three attempts. Each time, tar gives a message part of the way through about wrong header types.
Am I looking at a bad SCSI drive?
Thank you, if you have read this far!
Alan Davis
--
adavis@saipan.com 1-670-235-6580
Alan E. Davis, PMB 30, Box 10006, Saipan, MP 96950-8906, CNMI
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free, so as to give up any
hypothesis, however much beloved -- and I cannot resist forming one
on every subject -- as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.
-- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
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