*BSD News Article 6560


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From: felawka@sitka.triumf.ca (Larry Felawka)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Corrupted directory
Date: 14 Oct 1992 22:27:36 GMT
Organization: TRIUMF, Vancouver BC
Lines: 32
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1bi6soINN8au@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca>
References: <24966.9210120127@thor.cf.ac.uk> <26947.9210120417@thor.cf.ac.uk> <1bd165INNrfe@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca> <Bw4Fv7.M4L@unx.sas.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sitka.triumf.ca

In article <Bw4Fv7.M4L@unx.sas.com>, sastdr@torpid.unx.sas.com (Thomas David Rivers) writes:
|> 
|> Regarding this infinite reboot cycle; I recently applied the entire
|> beta patchkit (from a new, clean, installation of 386bsd 0.1) and
|> began getting this problem.
|> 
|> I.e. If I have to shut down for some reason, or the power goes out; the
|>      machine reboots.  Root gets fsck'd and repaired; and the
|>      machine reboots again.  Then there is another problem with the
|>      fsck of root, and the machine reboots, etc... encountering the
|>      same problem over and over.
|> 
|>  I've now seen this happen on two machines to which I applied the beta
|>  patchkit.  It did *not* happen on these machines using the kernel I 
|>  had patched together from news articles.   This means (at least to me)
|>  there is some patch applied by the patchkit which I had not otherwise
|>  applied in my kernel, that is causing the problem.
|> 
|>  I've seen it on a SCSI disk and IDE disk, so I don't think it's in the
|>  driver... could it be some of the changes to init.c?
|> 

Only indirectly ... the problem comes when you do the "make install" for
"init".  It appears that at this point the file system has become corrupted
and if you reboot you get the behaviour you have described.  One can recover
by inserting the fixit disk, rebooting from the floppy and doing
"fsck /dev/rwd0a".  The clean way to do the patch installation for init (and
other programs that are running while you are patching them) is probably to
do the "make", shut down and do the installation using the fixit disk.

-- 
Larry Felawka