I just recovered from a serious "crash"!
After successfully upgrading my Slack 7.1's binutils, utils-linux, etc, etc
and installing kernel 2.4.1 successfully, I decided to upgrade my Xfree86 to
4.0.2 from 3.3.6. I left the X code to compile overnight (was too tired to
wait), I woke up and checked to see if it compiled successfully. What I saw
was basically this:
"kernel bug in inode.c line 381" or some line near there.
Then I saw segmentation fault. and some other code after that (like it tried
to keep on compiling or something).
I could not ctrl-c or ctrl-d, alt-ctrl-delete anything. (the numlock worked
still, though so it wasn't a total freeze, at least).
So, I did the only thing I could do - hit the reset switch.
During the fsck phase of booting, it informed me that there was an
inconsistancy in the inodes on /dev/hda11 (my scrap drive, which is where I
was compiling Xfree86). It said that I could hit ctrl-d to continue booting
normally, or enter a root password for maintenance (and since I don't have a
root password - this is a stand-alone machine at home) it wouldn't let me in
for maintenance. Ctrl-d had the same results. It would just prepare for
rebooting. I tried it all again, but it wanted to shutdown for reboot.
So, I created boot disks and root disks with rawrite.exe on my win system and
booted up with them on the linux system. I moved whatever stuff from my
/dev/hda11 onto other partitions, then reformatted /dev/hda11.
I can boot now and everything is back to normal, but I was set back by the
type of error - in inode.c! This makes me very uncomfortable, since that is
directly related to how linux handles the file system. Should I even try to
recompile XFree86 4.0.2? Hell, I am wondering if I should drop back to the
2.2.x kernels - the error did mention that it was a "kernel bug", inode.c,
and such.
Any tips on how to procede?
--
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com
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