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January 18, 2005
Without a net
I'm down at the IEEE 802.11 meeting in Monterey and that means I'm working with my laptop. Normally, this would be fine, but last night when I booted the machine up, it generated a message that looked something like this:WARNING: / was not properly dismounted ad0s2g: hard error reading fsbn 14685439 of 4376928-4377055 (ad0s2 bn 14685439; cn 914 tn 32 sn 13) trying PIO mode ad0s2g: hard error reading fsbn 14685439 of 4376928-4377055 (ad0s2 bn 14685439; cn 914 tn 32 sn 13) status=59 error=40 ad0: READ command timeout tag=0 serv=0 - resetting ata0: resetting devices .. done WARNING: R/W mount of /usr denied. Filesystem is not clean - run fsck WARNING: /usr was not properly dismounted
Now, the first message isn't a problem. That just means that the machine was shut down improperly. It's lines 2-6 that are the problem. These indicate that the hard drive is generating some serious hardware errors. The next line tells us to run fsck(8) to check the filesystem, which you do manually once the boot has failed. Unfortunately when I did that, I just got more hardware errors, so the fsck can't complete and so the situation doesn't improve much.
The good news is that it only appears to be a few bad blocks and none of them seem to affect data that I actually care about. The bad news is that you're not supposed to mount filesystems that haven't been checked. The OK news is that the 'mount -f' flag lets you bypass that little restriction--as long as you don't mind behavior being a little...unpredictable. So far so good, though.
Posted by ekr at January 18, 2005 8:12 PM | Filed under: