Filesystem check failed

Hi,

Distro: Archlinux
DE: xfce4
Hard Drive: SATA 500gb Western Digital

Hard Drive Partitioning:
/dev/sda1 60gb NTFS Primary Partition - Windows
/dev/sda2 60gb NTFS Primary Partition - Music Storage
/dev/sda3 360gb NTFS Primary Partition - Media Storage
/dev/sda4 20gb Ext3 Primary Partition - Archlinux

Really sorry to keep posting loads of posts. I've currently got another post, relating to NTFS mounting, open but this is a more urgent fix that I need.

When I boot into arch, it gets to the filesystem check part, and sometimes passes fine, however a lot of the time it keeps failing the filesystem check and I have to reboot several times for arch to boot correctly.

The full error that I get is as follows:

Quote:

---

:: Checking Filesystems [BUSY]

/dev/sda4:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

[FAIL]

**********************FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED ******************
*
* Please repair manually and reboot. Note that the root file system is currently mounted read-only. To remount it read-write type: mount -n -o remount,rw /
* When you exit the maintenance shell the system will reboot automatically
*
************************************************** ************

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

---

Control-D just reboots the system.

I've tried a command that I found on a forum somewhere that involves the e2fsck command but can't remember exactly what it was or where I found it.

The other thing is... /dev/sda4 is my arch partition... and it isnt ext2... its ext3 so its a bit confusing why its looking for an ext2 partition.

It's been doing this right from the second I installed arch on this main PC... but it is really intermitant, sometimes it boots fine, other times it goes into the failed message.

Its really quite annoying and inconvenient,
Has anyone got any ideas why this is happening? and any ideas on how I can fix this problem?


Sorry again for all the posts, I'm reading into things as much as I can before I post but I simply don't understand some of the things that im reading.

Thanks so much,
Scott.

I had something similar when I installed several distros to spare partitions for testing.

Once I was at the maintenance shell, I ran fsck -f. Once it finished, I used the Control D to reboot and the problem was fixed.

Your problem is similar, check with the Arch people for their recommendations and to confirm that this wont Bork your system even worse.

Very annoying kind of problem.

Good luck.

Bob

Hi Bob,

I'll definitely try that, I'll just wait and see if any people that know Arch on this forum have anything to add before I try it.

Thanks,
Scott.

Bump!

Has anyone familiar with Archlinux got any advice on this subject?


Thanks,
Scott.

FWIW, ext3 file systems are ext2 systems with journaling enabled. Hence the message about accessing the superblock on an ext2 file system. In any case, your drive is probably starting to fail. You need to boot from a rescue/live CD/DVD/USB drive and check the file system for bad blocks. You can do this on the entire disc (not just a file system) with the /sbin/badblocks command. If it finds some bad blocks, then you need to try to copy your system and data to another drive. There are a number of techniques to do this, depending upon how bad the drive is getting. In any case, don't wait to recover your system and data - the drive won't get any better over time... :-(

Rubberman, thats jumping to conclusions a bit quick lol. If I didn't know any better id have to change my trousers now. The drive is less than a month old, don't have a single problem with it in windows. Its a brand new Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATAII 7200RPM 16MB Cache.

I'm sure the problem lies solely with linux, rather than a hardware failure issue. As I say, windows has been booting on it fine since christmas day when I installed it, still does boot on it fine, all the other partitions are accessible fine, and linux runs perfectly fine when it decides to get past the fail boot.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

Scott.

When drives fail, it is usually in the first month or two of use. I had a Seagate Barracuda go out recently, much in the same way yours did. It had to be replaced. Fortunately, I only lost one (unneeded) file. Which reminds me, it is past due for a bit-image back up of my system drive... :-)

Also, because Windows is ok, doesn't mean that the part of the drive where your Linux data resides is not starting to get bad blocks. In my case, there were less than 80 bad blocks, all clustered in one area of the disc.

Right, just run checks on both the windows partition, thats all clean and fine and ive run a check on the linux partition and thats all clean and fine.

In addition, when the linux partition does boot normally, and the filesystem check comes up, it says all the blocks are fine, supporting the other checks that ive just done.

In my 10 years experience with computers I've never heard that drives are most likely to fail within the first 3 months. I've heard that they fail either straight away or they fail later on down the line when they get old. But hey, maybe I'm wrong, its unimportant however, the important thing is that the drive is ok.

Thanks for the advice though Rubberman, I guess you never know until you check for sure, so it could have been a posibility.

So now that possibility is out of the way, has anyone got any other suggestions why the filesystem check fails intermitantly? I've read various posts where people have had exactly the same problem, and there doesn't seem to have been any definitive answers why this happens?

Thanks,
Scott.

Sorry. I'm out of ideas right now. I've not had this problem with either CentOS, Gentoo, Mepis, Fedora, Freespire, or Ubuntu (all the distributions I have used on a regular basis) on any of my systems over the past 10 years. The inconsistency is what makes me think there is a hardware problem.