On Tuesday 06 March 2007, Peter Alfredsen wrote: > On Tuesday 06 March 2007, Philip Webb wrote: > >Otherwise, my system is very stable & problem-free. > > I'm experiencing something similar at equally random intervals.
Just for your information, I discovered what the problem was. My 2½ year old Maxtor hd decided to let out the magic smoke. On my next reboot (evoked by a freeze), I was told my system was unable to mount my hd. It seems a number of bad blocks had been forming on my hd for these past few months, just waiting to trap me between a rock and a hard place. Luckily, the bad blocks were contained to a single area of the hd. My method of recovery was straight-forward. I checked for bad blocks with badblocks, did a complete reiserfsck with --rebuild-tree and entered the hd and chrooted. Uhoh. /bin/bash segfault. I guess it's not called reiserfsck for nothing. A number of files had gotten little cutesie binary things embedded into them by reiserfsck, even though they weren't anywhere near the bad blocks. I had ordered a new hd by now and was waiting for it to arrive. I fixed the /bin/bash segfault by getting a quickpkg of the livecd bash. Gcc was fscked too. I downloaded a binpkg off tinderbox.gentoo.org. I did this until I had a fully functioning emerge system. I then did an emerge -e world to get the right files in place, with FEATURES="buildpkg", so I could use the binpkgs to get a working system with my new hd. I learned of a new portage location here: /var/cache/edb/dep/usr/portage/. emerge --metadata didn't work, segfaulting, and if I tried to emerge some things, it would complain of the missing "syake" dependency. This was fixed by deleting /var/cache/edb/dep/usr/portage/ and doing emerge --metadata. Yesterday morning, the emerge -e world had completed and I received my new hd later that day. Installing that was a comparative breeze. I just copied /etc/* to the new hd, emerged everything from binpkgs and was up and running. But when I emerged new stuff not from binpkgs, the configure would complain of the missing /usr/bin/as. Uhoh. It seems gcc doesn't create the necessary symlinks in /usr/bin automatically when emerging from binpkg (FIXME). I fixed this by installing the necessary symlinks from the bad hd. I am now in the process of a new emerge -e world, to get everything back in perfect order. /PA -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
