File System Problems

[toothandnail]

I've just installed LL 2.2  (32-bit) on a Lenovo T420 laptop. The machine has Win7 (not used much, I'm glad to say...), plus Arch Linux and Sparky Linux already installed.

I used the "something else" option in the installer to set up partitions. Can't say I found the "change" dialogue very intuitive, but I eventually got mount points set up for / and /home, with / being formatted ext4, /home being left alone (since I use the same home partition for the other Linux installs as well).

Install went fairly well, though I would have liked an option to disable plymouth - don't like it and I've had problems with it with some video cards. If there is an option to disable it, I didn't see it during the install.

After install, I couldn't get the machine to complete boot in Linux-lite. I managed to escape the plymouth screen early enough to see that the system was complaining about serious file system errors on the /home partition. Selecting "Ignore" allowed boot to complete. The home partition wasn't formatted during install, and uses xfs as a file system.

I booted from a SystemRescue CD and ran xfs_repair on the /home partition - no problems found, but LL still complained about serious file system errors on the partition. I then modified /etc/fstab to include the root partitions for my other Linux installs (they also use xfs filesystem).

I was able to mount the other partitions, but the next time I started the system I got errors on all of the xfs partitions, followed by an error mounting /home, so the system would not complete startup.

Anyone else using xfs? I use it by preference, and I've never had this sort of problem before. Not to mention that attempting to boot other systems showed that partitions that had no problems earlier needed xfs_repair to be run before they would run the other distributions cleanly.

Paul.

[ukbrian]

You need to change what's in "GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=" it assumes it will be the primary boot in grub or summat, Jerry will explain better than I.

Never used xfs so I'm blank on that exept have you tried installing mint xfce? to rule out a distro problem.

[toothandnail]

You need to change what's in "GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=" it assumes it will be the primary boot in grub or summat, Jerry will explain better than I.

Thanks. Not sure I follow that, though. I can change the boot order without too many problems. What I was interested in was either avoiding installing plymouth or disabling it. For the moment, I've changed the grub command line to include "quiet" which stops plymouth displaying and means I can see the error messages quickly enough to react.

Never used xfs so I'm blank on that exept have you tried installing mint xfce? to rule out a distro problem.

I haven't yet. I've got a copy of Xubuntu 4.04, so I guess I can try that. I've never seen that error before, and on the few occasions that I've had problems with xfs, running xfs_repair normally shows what the error was and also clears it (unless the drive itself is faulty). The fact that the error didn't clear and that some damage seems to have been done was what concerned me. Once I set Grub to boot Arch again, I had all sorts of problems with things not running as they should. Ended up having to boot from a live CD and run xfs_repair on the Arch root partition, which I've never had to do before...

Paul.

[rokytnji]

I run xfs on / and /home on my 64gig ssd drive on my Salix 14.1 Fluxbox netbook just fine.
But it is a dedicated one linux operating system netbook.

I am wondering if I read correctly. You are sharing /home between Arch and Linux-Lite?

If so. I think that is the root of your problems. I used to dual and quad and multi-boot via a variety of methods
from grub4dos to grub legacy.

I never shared partitions between distros though. Everybody had their own territory to operate in.

[toothandnail]

I run xfs on / and /home on my 64gig ssd drive on my Salix 14.1 Fluxbox netbook just fine.
But it is a dedicated one linux operating system netbook.

I used to run Salix. Moved to Arch about 3 years ago.

I am wondering if I read correctly. You are sharing /home between Arch and Linux-Lite?

Yes. Different users, but the same partition.

If so. I think that is the root of your problems. I used to dual and quad and multi-boot via a variety of methods
from grub4dos to grub legacy.

I never shared partitions between distros though. Everybody had their own territory to operate in.

I've used the same method for years. Only time I've ever had problems is if I share the user id between different distros. I've had a number of different distros loaded that way - CentOS, Fedora, Slackware, Salix and more recently Arch.

I've never seen the error message I was seeing from LL before either. It was happening consistently on all the xfs partition on the machine, even though they all showed up as clean originally. The other oddity was that after I added the other xfs partitions to /etc/fstab, LL would not complete booting - it failed to mount the xfs /home partition and failed to boot any further.

I've taken the other xfs partitions out of fstab, and will try booting LL again later. See what happens this time....