fsck on corrupted /

[Denny White]

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On Aug 29 Erik Norgaard boldly spake forth the following:
>>
> Denny White wrote:
>
>> The problem started with a power outage before I
>> had the box in question on a ups. I switched it
>> to the ups and ran fsck and thought all was well.
>> Then I started having periodic reboots. After the
>> last one, the system would crash about the time
>> fsck was checking pathnames. Have tried running
>> fsck on / from both single user mode and from the
>> fixit live cd. Same thing, crashes. Any help/ideas
>> greatly appreciated.
>
> If you can, try to boot mounting / read-only, at least you shouldn't get disk 
> errors on that label then. But this may just be your disk degrading from bad 
> to worse untill it's final death :-(
>
> Do you get any READ_DMA or WRITE_DMA errors? I remember that there has been a 
> lot of threads regarding disk errors the last month, try searching the 
> archive for hints.
>
> For example you should be able to lower throughput using ata_control, this 
> may reduce problems.
>
> Cheers, Erik
>

Very sorry for not answering earlier. Evacuated Biloxi 8/30 for
hurricane katrina. Back home now. Quite a mess here. I was able
to finally run fsck successfully, using a fbsd 5.3 live cd in
single user mode. Never had any success previous to that, just
booting the 5.4 system into single user & doing fsck. The box
has been running ok since I got back to the house and didn't
give me me any further problems until I started running my
update script again, which really just does some simple update
stuff. Cvsup's src, ports, & docs; installs new docs; fetches
new ports index & runs portsdb -u; runs portversion -l "<" &
portaudit -Fda & exits. Only thing changed at all on the system
is the docs that are updated & the updated portsdb. Have had no
WRITE_DMA or READ_DMA errors. Only time anything got scrambled
up was after the initial power outage that started the problems,
but fsck reported everything salvaged & marked clean. I thought
best & simplest way to check for hardware problems, since the
box isn't a production system & is mostly just for learning &
surfing, was to run a live cd on it for a couple of days and
see if I get any reboots.? Definitely mount the h/d's too,
while doing so. Thanks for any further thoughts &ideas on the
issue. Sorry again for the late answer.

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