Unable to perform clean shutdown.

Hans Nieser h.nieser at xs4all.nl
Sat Oct 29 16:34:14 PDT 2005


Hi list,

I am experimenting with using FreeBSD as a desktop OS (with Xorg and
GNOME), and because I still need to keep Windows around for certain
applications, I have decided to create 3 partitions (or slices in the BSD
world). One NTFS, for Windows (ad8s1, 40GiB), one for FreeBSD (ad8s2,
20GiB) and one Ext2 partition to share data between the two OSs (ad8s3,
taking up the rest of the disk). The disk itself is a S-ATA disk, and
identified during boot-up as:

> ad8: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0/08.02D08> [387621/16/63] at
ata4-master UDMA33

I chose Ext2 as it would allow me to still use UNIX permissions under
FreeBSD, and could be read from and written to in Windows using a
third-party driver. Because neither FreeBSD nor the Ext2 driver in Windows
support Ext3 journalling I figured there was no point in using that.

My problem is, and I believe it started after I created the Ext2
partition, that my system is not able to perform a clean shutdown anymore.
When I do a "shutdown -p now" or "reboot" it will sync the disks but then
says "Giving up on 8 buffers." right before it turns off, is that normal?

When FreeBSD boots the next time it will complain and tells me "WARNING: /
was not properly dismounted.", it does this for all the FreeBSD partitions
(/var, /tmp, /usr).

It also appears that the fsck for Ext2 (which I had to install from ports
and then manually copy the e2fsck and fsck_ext2fs binaries from
/usr/local/sbin to /sbin) also has some issues, as it outputs the
following during boot-up:

> fsck_ext2fs: unknown option -F

Dispite that, the next thing happens is a forced fsck of the Ext2
partition (which takes a while). Then eventually FreeBSD boots and GDM 
starts and all seems to be in working order.

This is what my /etc/fstab looks like:

> # Device       Mountpoint      FStype  Options            Dump  Pass# 
> /dev/ad8s2b    none            swap    sw                 0     0 
> /dev/ad8s2a    /               ufs     rw                 1     1 
> /dev/ad8s2e    /tmp            ufs     rw                 2     2 
> /dev/ad8s2f    /usr            ufs     rw                 2     2 
> /dev/ad8s2d    /var            ufs     rw                 2     2
> 
> /dev/acd0      /mnt/cdrom      cd9660  ro,noauto,noexec   0     0 
> /dev/ad8s1     /mnt/windows    ntfs    ro,noexec          0     0 
> /dev/ad8s3     /mnt/shared     ext2fs  rw                 0     2

Does anyone know what causes my system not to be able to perform a clean
shutdown anymore? and, does anyone know what the deal with fsck_ext2fs
being called with a non-existent -F options is?


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