Fedora 14 hanging on boot

[Rukia-chan]

Hi ^^
I'm new to Linux so bear with me
My F14 PC (the only OS installed) hangs on boot.
After a normal shut down yesterday, I opened it but the boot lasts forever, pressed F8 to see what's going on, I found it hanging on "Starting SMB services" and generating errors (I'm not able to remember what they were) so I shut it down using the power button ^^'
Same thing over and over for about 4 times, then the fifth time I decided to wait (for sooo long) and it passed the boot and the GUI started
Not a long time after, the GUI suddenly stopped functioning, not knowing what I should do I again shut it down using the power button and then restarted it, this time it hangs again and after a long wait it displayed "Unable to mount root filesystem. Sleeping forever"

I tried over and over, it's always the same thing, whether hangs on Starting SMB services or just hangs and displays the Sleeping forever message I don't know what's wrong with it, and am not not sure what to do, I have a live usb with F13 but don't know what commands to run in it

Sorry for the long message and thanks for anyone who's willing to try to help me ^^

IMG1842A.jpgIMG1843A.jpgIMG1844A.jpgIMG1845A.jpg

PS: Sorry for the bad quality of the images tried to take them while it's booting to show you the kind of messages that are displayed

[atreyu]

That drive (sda) has I/O errors, it seems. As in, probably it is going to die soon. You can try booting with the F13 live usb and typing "linux rescue" at the boot prompt. It will not touch the hard drives, so you should be able to boot.

It may ask you to automount Linux installations, say "No". Once you get to a shell prompt (#), run this command, to look at drive status:

dmesg|grep [sh]d[a-z]

You can also try smartctl, though I don't know if that'll be available on the rescue system:

smartctl --all -H /dev/sda

Look in that output for the overall health assessment, and any obvious errors.

[Rukia-chan]

Thank you very much atreyu for replying, I really appreciate that ^^

When I boot from the live usb (F13), it gives me this:
SYSLINUX 4.04 EDD 2011-04-18 Copyright (C) 1994-2011 H. Peter Anvin et al
vesamenu.c32: not a COM32R image
boot: _
When I press TAB it gives me this:
linux0 check0 memtest local

When I type linux0, it starts the GUI normally

Sorry but I'm not sure where to enter the rescue mode with that?

[atreyu]

Thank you very much atreyu for replying, I really appreciate that ^^

When I boot from the live usb (F13), it gives me this:
SYSLINUX 4.04 EDD 2011-04-18 Copyright (C) 1994-2011 H. Peter Anvin et al
vesamenu.c32: not a COM32R image
boot: _
When I press TAB it gives me this:
linux0 check0 memtest local

When I type linux0, it starts the GUI normally

Sorry but I'm not sure where to enter the rescue mode with that?

Type

linux rescue

at that boot: prompt.

[Rukia-chan]

Thanks again atreyu for replying ^^

When I type linux rescue to that boot prompt it just gives me:
Could not find kernel image: linux

That's why I posted the possible commands in that prompt in my previous post: linux0..

Is there a possibilty that there is something wrong with the live usb?

[atreyu]

I should have caught that, try "linux0 rescue"

caveat: i'm not familiar with Live USB anything...

Edit: You can try downloading and burning SystemRescueCd - it is great for things like this.

[Rukia-chan]

Thanks for the fast reply atreyu ^^

When I type linux0 rescue it just starts the GUI as in linux0

Thanks for the link, but the problem is that my internal cd drive is not working and I can't boot on my external one ^^'

So, just a question, can I run the commands you gave me (dmesg..) in a terminal after the GUI started or should it be in the rescue mode?

[atreyu]

oh, yeah, you can run dmesg any time you are in Linux. Just open a terminal and run it. I was suggesting rescue mode b/c that way, you don't touch the drive itself and cause lock-ups, etc.

btw, the stock Fedora CD/DVD always comes with a "rescue" option, that is where I was getting that.

you could try booting into runlevel 1 instead of the normal mode (3 or 5) which would hit the drive a lot less, too. just append " 1" (lower case L) to the kernel parameters at boot time.

[Rukia-chan]

Thanks again atreyu for replying

I ran the command you gave me (smartctl didn't work in the live usb) on a terminal in the GUI and it gave me:

[root@localhost liveuser]# dmesg|grep [sh]d[a-z]

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 195371568 512-byte logical blocks: (100 GB/93.1 GiB)

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
 
sda:

sda1 sda2 sda3

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 7936000 512-byte logical blocks: (4.06 GB/3.78 GiB)

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

 sdb: sdb1

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

SELinux: initialized (dev sdb1, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts

sdhci: Secure Digital Host Controller Interface driver

sdhci: Copyright(c) Pierre Ossman

sdhci-pci 0000:07:06.3: SDHCI controller found [104c:803c] (rev 0
)
sdhci-pci 0000:07:06.3: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18

hda_codec: ALC861-VD: BIOS auto-probing.

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:4284: autoconfig: line_outs=1 (0x14/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:4288:    speaker_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:4292:    hp_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:4293:    mono: mono_out=0x0

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:4304:    inputs: mic=0x18, fmic=0x0, line=0x0, fline=0x0, cd=0x0, aux=0x0

ALSA sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c:1313: realtek: Enabling init ASM_ID=0x1205 CODEC_ID=10ec0862

Adding 2452472k swap on /dev/sda3.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:2452472k

Any idea what I should do next?

and thanks for the second option but I'm not sure about how to proceed , where to append the "1" etc. Any clarifications?

Thanks ^^

[atreyu]

The output of dmesg looks good - in that I don't see any I/O errors. Perhaps you just had a filesystem corruption, something that an fsck run could fix. BTW, is the above run from your F13 USB live Fedora? Is your system still not booting normally w/o the USB alternate booting?

In any event, once booted into the USB system, in a terminal, run fsck /dev/sda1. It is not good to run fsck on a mounted filesystem, but your hard drive partitions should not have been mounted. In any case, fsck will pause and give you a verbal lashing if you do run it on a mounted filesystem. You'll want to run fsck on all your ext* partitions. Get a listing of them with:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

for example, here's my output:

Disk /dev/sda: 8000 MB, 8000110592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 972 cylinders, total 15625216 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0005eb49

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048    15364095     7681024   83  Linux
/dev/sda2        15364096    15624191      130048   82  Linux swap / Solaris

So I have two partitions on /dev/sda, sda1 and sda2. sda1 is an ext3 filesystem (it says "Linux") and sda2 is a swap partition. So I'd just have to run fsck on sda1.

When you run it, it may ask you if it is okay to fix inodes, go ahead and fix them.


I mis-spoke in my previous post, the " 1" is a number one, NOT a lower case L. Anyway, you'd use it to try and boot your installed system in single user mode, but since you have a working USB alternative, I'd stick with that.