Re: hang on bootstrap

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

I finally had some time to tinker with my HURD box again.

Justus Winter wrote:
> If you are running a debug kernel (and you should), you can break into
> the kernel debugger using ctrl-alt-d and do:
Sadly I am not. I have only one kernel in my /boot dir and it doesn't 
respond to ctrl-alt-d. apt-get installs apparently only the non-debug 
kernel without more hints. I bet I had a debug kernel installed too, but 
it is gone or iI hallucinate.
> To recover from this, use a Hurd live CD (I guess the Debian installer
> CD will do), or even a random Debian/Linux live CD.  Run fsck on your
> root filesystem.  If that doesn't help, some important files might
> have been corrupted.  You could then try reinstalling the hurd,
> hurd-libs, and libc0.3 packages.  This is doable even from Linux
> (mount your rootfs using mount -t ext2 /dev/your/root /mnt, use
> dpkg-deb --extract hurd.deb /mnt).
I tried a slightly different procedure: I am able to boot the last HURD 
cdrom I had, I mount the target, chroot to it and I had in the cache 
three different hurd versions with respective libraries, I used "dpkg 
-i" to install the previous one, kernel + lib,  (which most probably did 
work, since I was able to reboot and install the latter one) but still 
my box freezes.

Is my procedure sound as yours? I suppose so. perhaps what's missing is 
a libc downgrade then.

> To prevent this in the future, regularly run touch /forcefsck to force
> a fsck on your filesystems.  There is a known problem in ext2fs
> affecting root filesystem translators, deleted inodes with zero dtime
> are accumulating until no free inodes are left.
:) I'll remember that, however it would be a nice fix to see in the kernel.

Riccardo