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Topic: fsck always fails after a power loss, isn't ext3 supposed to prevent this?

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schamberlin Offline

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Posts: 6
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Jan. 12 2006,07:11

Can anyone explain why I always get a "fsck failed, reboot linux" style error on the next boot-up after a power loss?

I'm building a digital picture frame from an old laptop using DSL. I've done an HD install, formatting the disk in a single partition using ext3. My problem is that boot-up after power loss always generates some kind of filesystem error. If the computer is running and you press the power button, it immediately turns off without doing a clean shutdown. On the next bootup, with 100% likelihood I'll see this:

Code Sample

Checking root file system...
fsck 1.34-WIP (21-May-2003)
/dev/hda1 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
/dev/hda1:
Deleted inode 630431 has zero dtime. FIXED.
/dev/hda1: Deleted inode 630431 has zero dtime. FIXED.
/dev/hda1: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
/dev/hda1: 17441/759520 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 103565/1516126 block

fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. Please note
that the root filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To
remount it read-write:

# mount -n -o remount,rw /

Then it dumps me to a text-mode command prompt. This is no good, because the whole thing is inside a picture frame and has no keyboard. This happens regardless of what was happening (or not happening) at the time the system was powered off.

I thought the whole point of using ext3 was that it's a journaling filesystem, and is supposed to prevent exactly these kinds of errors? Can you think of any clever ways I can prevent or work-around this?

What about a startup script that does dmesg | grep 'REBOOT LINUX' and automatically reboots the PC if it finds it? Since it always seem to boot up fine on the second boot after a power loss, this might fix the problem without any user intervention.

Thanks!

Ivan-NL

Group: Members
Posts: 16
Joined: Dec. 2005

Posted: Jan. 12 2006,13:13

Does it have ACPI?

If so you can try to let it give a clean shutdown when the mains is disconnected. Ony thing you need for that is working batteries as that will take a minute or so.

schamberlin Offline

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Posts: 6
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Jan. 12 2006,16:23

Good idea, but the laptop has no battery and is always plugged in. When I said "power loss", what I meant was the laptop being switched off with the power button without doing a clean shutdown.

I'll look into modifying the power button's behavior if that's possible, but there's still always the likelihood that someone will just unplug the thing. So I really need a solution that recovers from hard shutdowns, instead of (or in addition to) a solution that attempts to avoid a hard shutdown.

This seems like a bug with DSL, ext3, or my configuration. I thought that since ext3 was a journaling filesystem, it could gracefully recover from minor problems like a filesystem not being unmounted cleanly. Right?

cbagger01

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Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Jan. 12 2006,18:40

I think that DSL mounts EXT3 partitions as if they were old style EXT2 partitions. I could be wrong, but somebody will need to check this.

I use reiserfs version 3.x for my data partitions.

DSL has builting support for reiserfs mounting, but you still need to get reiserfstools in order to create a new partition from scratch.

schamberlin Offline

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Posts: 6
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Jan. 13 2006,00:06

Quote

I think that DSL mounts EXT3 partitions as if they were old style EXT2 partitions.

How can I enable full ext3 support then? Is it as simple (?) as just recompiling the kernel with the right options enabled?

Quote

I use reiserfs version 3.x for my data partitions.

I saw a mention elsewhere that although DSL can mount reiserfs data partitions, it can't boot from them. Is that still true? If it is, then I'll still need an ext2/3 boot partition, and will still have this same fsck failure after a hard shutdown.

9 replies since Jan. 12 2006,07:11

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