*BSD News Article 6600


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
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From: sastdr@torpid.unx.sas.com (Thomas David Rivers)
Subject: Re: Corrupted directory
Sender: news@unx.sas.com (Noter of Newsworthy Events)
Message-ID: <Bw62ps.n57@unx.sas.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 14:25:04 GMT
References: <1bd165INNrfe@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca> <Bw4Fv7.M4L@unx.sas.com> <1bi6soINN8au@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca>
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Organization: SAS Institute Inc.
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In article <1bi6soINN8au@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca> felawka@sitka.triumf.ca (Larry Felawka) writes:
>In article <Bw4Fv7.M4L@unx.sas.com>, sastdr@torpid.unx.sas.com (Thomas David Rivers) writes:
>|> 
>|> Regarding this infinite reboot cycle; I recently applied the entire
>|> beta patchkit (from a new, clean, installation of 386bsd 0.1) and
>|> began getting this problem.
>|> 
>|> I.e. If I have to shut down for some reason, or the power goes out; the
>|>      machine reboots.  Root gets fsck'd and repaired; and the
>|>      machine reboots again.  Then there is another problem with the
>|>      fsck of root, and the machine reboots, etc... encountering the
>|>      same problem over and over.
>|> 
>|>  I've now seen this happen on two machines to which I applied the beta
>|>  patchkit.  It did *not* happen on these machines using the kernel I 
>|>  had patched together from news articles.   This means (at least to me)
>|>  there is some patch applied by the patchkit which I had not otherwise
>|>  applied in my kernel, that is causing the problem.
>|> 
>|>  I've seen it on a SCSI disk and IDE disk, so I don't think it's in the
>|>  driver... could it be some of the changes to init.c?
>|> 
>
>Only indirectly ... the problem comes when you do the "make install" for
>"init".  It appears that at this point the file system has become corrupted
>and if you reboot you get the behaviour you have described.  One can recover
>by inserting the fixit disk, rebooting from the floppy and doing
>"fsck /dev/rwd0a".  The clean way to do the patch installation for init (and
>other programs that are running while you are patching them) is probably to
>do the "make", shut down and do the installation using the fixit disk.
>
>-- 
>Larry Felawka


While that may be the case; I have seen it occur several days (and
*many* reboots) after I changed init.  There must be something else
going on as well. 


The problem is not consistent; just every now and then, when rebooting
after the machine locks up (leaving the file system in a bad state) you
can fall into this infinite-boot-loop.


Also, I noticed that, with the new init, when the fsck of root fails,
it drops you into single user mode, but the rc script is still running,
as evidenced by a message "starting network" appearing over my
single-user shell prompt.  Then; it reboots...  Could this be causing
the problem (i.e. we get "part of the way" up to multi-user, and 
munge the file system again before the reboot succeeds.)

	- Dave Rivers -
	(rivers@ponds.uucp (home))
	(sastdr@unx.sas.com (work))

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