gshenaut
09-27-2005, 07:27 PM
Has anyone seen this? My original 17" G4 PB running 10.4.2 was in a strange state this morning. I had left it at the login window overnight, but was still logged in. When I clicked my icon, a beach ball started spinning, but after a short time, it stopped spinning. I could move it all around, but it never went away. From another machine, I could ping my PB, but ssh timed out.
I finally powered it down, but after a reboot, it hung with a blue screen and a mouse cursor. I booted single user mode, and ran "fsck -fy /". It found a couple of minor errors, and automatically ran again with no further errors. It printed out "FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED", but no prompt appeared. I tried ^C, nothing happened. I tried ^Z, and it indicated that it stopped fsck, demonstrating that it was still running. However, no prompt appeared. I did ^T and got a message from the shell saying it couldn't be interrupted.
Finally, I powered down again, & when the machine rebooted, it seemed fine, and still seems fine.
I'm not too concerned about the strange mode the machine got into at night, but I am a bit confused about fsck. I hadn't seen the auto-rerun before. Could it be that it was actually trying to run again, after a no-errors auto-rerun? If so, then this might be an fsck bug that could have caused the earlier hang as well--that is, if it finds an error, it would keep on rechecking until reset. That wouldn't be good.
AFAIK, this is the first time fsck ever found an error on my disk, so I have no idea if this is atypical behavior. It would be atypical on other *nixes I've used.
Greg Shenaut
hayne
09-27-2005, 07:56 PM
I've never heard of this sort of thing before.
I would try booting into single-user mode and doing it again, but being sure to use the full path:
/sbin/fsck -fy
(Note that you don't usually supply a filesystem argument - i.e. no "/" at the end. It knows what to do by default.)
gshenaut
09-27-2005, 08:26 PM
Well, like I say, the system seems to be running OK now.
What's with this auto-retry with fsck? Is that new?
Greg Shenaut
hayne
09-27-2005, 09:37 PM
What's with this auto-retry with fsck? Is that new?
I've not heard of anything about auto-repeat and a quick check of the 10.4 Darwin source code for fsck didn't show anything either.
Did you try it again? I guess you can't reproduce the situation since now there are no problems with your disk.
DeltaMac
09-27-2005, 10:21 PM
Yes, that's new. The Disk Utility, and the fsck will re-run if it needs to (I'm not sure what triggers the rerun, sometimes happens, sometimes does not) There is significant improvement to that disk repair function, and will only do this with the 10.4.2 software. I am waiting to see a 10.4.2 installer DVD. A 10.4 installer DVD does not have this capability.
gshenaut
09-27-2005, 10:34 PM
I really don't want to shut down ungracefully just to check this out.
I guess I'll just put it down to sunspots for the moment.
Greg
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