On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 22:58 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Saturday 05 January 2008, John Summerfield wrote: > >Gene Heskett wrote: > >> Greetings; > >> > >> I had my boot drives partition table zeroed out last night by something > >> unk, and then X froze. > > > >Coincidentally, I've just had a kubuntu system destroy itself. It was > >installed as 7.04, upgraded to 7.10. > > > >Much to my astonishment, the system (cheap ASUS mobo, socket-A CPU, via > >chipset, generic) can suspend and hibernate, and power up on keypress. > > > >As best I can figure it, this is the sequence of events. > > > >I powered down, presumably using the new-found hibernate ability. > > > >I booted, chose a XEN-capable kernel. It might have been a 7.04 kernel, > >I couldn't see one obviously for 7.10. > > > >I shut down. > > > >I booted, chose the latest (non-XEN) kernel. > > > >It resumed! > > > >I used it for a time. > > > >I shut down. > > > >I rebooted. > > > >Now, we have a complicating factor: I use VGA=791, but with this kernel > >framebuffer does not work so I'm booting blind: nothing to see until X > >starts. > > > >Anyway, Nothing visible happened for a long time. > > > >I reset, then booted with VGA=6. > > > >System booted for manual fsck. > > > >I thought unkind thoughts about people who write fsck programs whose > >reports and messages are entirely incomprehensible to all but the > >highest of high priests, and ran > >e2fsck -y /dev/hda6 > > > >There were lots and lots of messages about blocks being zeroed and/or > >freed and e2fsck restarting. > > > >Eventually, it finshed and ^D lead to a reboot. > > > >Later, I ran cfdisk to see what the partition table is, for reasons > >nothing to do with the above problems. > > > >cfdisk declined to do anything, but fdisk is happy to have a look. > > > >The partition table includes logs of hooley, with overlapping partitions > >and general mess. > > > >"reinstall" comes to mind. Fortunately, hda7 seems okay. I've copied it > >to another drive. > > > >I've looked around, everything seems to work, _but_ I don't see how or > >why I should trust it. > > > >Fortunately, "reinstall" was close to the top of the agenda for this > >box, and the main question was "with what?" > > > >Disk drive checks ok with smartctl and there are no errors logged to > >syslog.. Drive had about 345 power-on hours, shouldn't have expired yet. > > > > > >Choices are SL5, C5 and (possibly) Debian. > > > >Makes me wonder whether there might have been something unusual going on > >in your system, > > > > > I have f8 (latest i386 respin dvd) installed on it now, and have about got > everything configured, but its been an interesting ride so far. > > One instant problem is bothering me, it appears that my kmail filters menu > survived the recovery from an amrecover session, but it is now immutable, so > I can't add some of the new aliases to a filter rule. I can add them to the > filter screen, but when I click the apply button, anything I've added is > reverted to the original. > > Now, the weirdsville part is that I can open > the /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc with less or vim, and the rules I've > added ARE there. > > That files perms are: > -rw------- 1 root root 99100 2008-01-05 22:31 /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc > > Can someone else please do an ls -l on their file and show me what it has for > perms on your f8 machine that can successfully edit those filter rules. > > I've nuked /root/kmailrc, and then restarted kmail as root, with no visible > effect. The edits are lost the instant I click 'apply' > > Am I barking up the wrong tree here or what? > > Thanks John and to anybody else that wants to chime in with helpfull info > here, I'm plumb bumfuzzled from lack of sleep (a graveyard session at the > transmitter last night also turned into a nightmare) and this whole damned > zeroed out partition table fiasco. > > And as I add stuff back, selinux is being a PITA, so I may yet > touch /.autorelabel and reboot, but there are no messages about that above > file. Nor are there any messages about it in setroubleshoot's display. ---- we've been down this lane before...you shouldn't use GUI as root anyway... $ ls -l ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc -rw------- 1 craig craig 113235 2007-11-25 10:11 /home/craig/.kde/share/config/kmailrc yes, I would boot/relabel Craig
