Re: Netra X1 hardware flakiness

[Chris Ross <cross+netbsd%distal.com@localhost>]

On May 10, 2010, at 10:03 AM, Robert Elz wrote:
> What I see from your output is that the filesystem on the disk in question
> is clearly very badly broken - I see no immediate evidence that the disk
> itself has any issues.

  Right.  As you noted, there are a number of things that could've caused that, 
but the filesystem was laid out reasonably, and wasn't brought online without 
fsck'ing, or anything unusual.  And this is just the last error, beyond all of 
the other errors that also seem filesystem related.  At least, when things are 
loaded from the filesystem, they then "go bad".  Crashing binaries, .so files 
that look okay in ls(1) output, but fail to be loaded/seen by either the binary 
or ldd, etc.

> You need a single user mode (or at least unmounted filesystem mode) fsck
> of that filesystem, and let it correct everything it finds that is wrong.
> It will delete (probably many) files.   After that, if you still have
> future problems with that disk, then start investigating the hardware.

  Yup.  Already been too/past this point.  I've installed an OS on the disk a 
couple of times even.  And, each of those consisted of many manually repair 
with single-user fsck'ing, then coming up multiuser, to later have problems.

> You should probably also install sysutils/smartmontools from pkgsrc
> (after fixing all filesystem problems) and see if it reports any problems
> with your drive - a 40GB drive is going to be old by now, so it certainly
> might be failing - but it should be new enough to support SMART. 

  That's a very good idea.  I'm running a -current netbooted at the moment, so 
that should be easy enough to do from there and see what it has to say.

  Thanks for that suggestion, and all of the other information/assistance.

                             - Chris