Hi :) Quoting Riccardo Mottola (2014-09-08 22:30:12) > after the last udpate (I admit, a couple of weeks ago before the holiday > season) which was apparently successful, my system doesn't boot anymore. > > I get: > > <...> > start ext2fs: ext2fs: device:hd0s1: warning: FILESYSTEM NOT UNMOUNTED > CLEANLY; PLEASE fsck > Hurd server bootstrap: ext2fs[device:hd0s1] exec > > And here it hangs forever, no disk activity, nothing (although > eventually the screen will blank) > > I then tried to enter GRUB and use the "recovery mode" ( is this the new > wording for single-user?)
Yes. This will append '-s' to the kernel command line, which well eventually get passed to sysvinit. It will then do the same thing as Debian/Linux: Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S. [...] Cleaning up temporary files.... Press enter for maintenance(or type Control-D to continue): root@debian:~# uname -a GNU debian 0.5 GNU-Mach 1.4-486/Hurd-0.5 i686-AT386 GNU Yay sysvinit :) > The output changes, but hangs in the same place: > > <...> > start ext2fs: ext2fs: device:hd0s1: warning: FILESYSTEM NOT UNMOUNTED > CLEANLY; PLEASE fsck > ext2fs: device:hd0s1: warning: MOUNTED READ-ONLY; MUST USE 'fsysopts > ''writable' > Hurd server bootstrap: ext2fs[device:hd0s1] exec It's funny that you get a different output... > What is happening? is ext2fs server haning because my filesystem wasn't > cleanly unmounted? It would be nice to get at least in single-user and > run fsck! I'm afraid that at this point in the Hurd bootstrap, if either of ext2fs or exec dies, nothing will be displayed. If you are running a debug kernel (and you should), you can break into the kernel debugger using ctrl-alt-d and do: ^D Stopped at 0x801000be: leave db> show all threads TASK THREADS 0 gnumach (a0895f00): 8 threads: [...] 1 ext2fs (a0895e40): 16 threads: [...] 2 exec (a0895d80): 4 threads: [...] 3 a0895cc0 (a0895cc0): (a08c3548) .W.O.F(0x8014d850) 0 4 a0895c00 (a0895c00): 3 threads: [...] 5 a0895b40 (a0895b40): 4 threads: [...] 6 /bin/sh(1) (a0895a80): 2 threads: 3 is /hurd/init, which I guess isn't even run on your systems. To recover from this, use a Hurd live CD (I guess the Debian installer CD will do), or even a random Debian/Linux live CD. Run fsck on your root filesystem. If that doesn't help, some important files might have been corrupted. You could then try reinstalling the hurd, hurd-libs, and libc0.3 packages. This is doable even from Linux (mount your rootfs using mount -t ext2 /dev/your/root /mnt, use dpkg-deb --extract hurd.deb /mnt). To prevent this in the future, regularly run touch /forcefsck to force a fsck on your filesystems. There is a known problem in ext2fs affecting root filesystem translators, deleted inodes with zero dtime are accumulating until no free inodes are left. Good luck :) Justus