[conspire] Guy with the OpenSUSE server now has problems

[Rick Moen]

This is the fellow who visited two meetings ago with a server,
and I helped him upgrade to current OpenSUSE.

----- Forwarded message from ??? ### <fwcarr at gmail.com> -----

Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 13:05:34 -0700
From: ??? ### <fwcarr at gmail.com>
To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: Future Installfests

Rick,

Major troubles - While trying to copy the var messages, the server up and
died. Root is corrupted and will not boot.

All drives have check out as good according to seagate's drive utility.
Have installed a new power supply and cables. All diagnostics indicated
nothing wrong.

When I tried to do a fresh in install, and it will not let me delete the
previous partitions, re-create or accept the previous partitions. Install
fails when its tries to format.

I'm thinking of boot from live disc and trying to formatting all drives.

What do you think???

Fred

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:56:16 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: ??? ### <fwcarr at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Future Installfests
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting ??? ### (fwcarr at gmail.com):

> Rick,
> 
> Major troubles - While trying to copy the var messages, the server up and
> died. Root is corrupted and will not boot.

Fred, sorry to take a while getting back to you.  There are a couple of
things to cover, and I needed to defer the matter until I really had
time and nobody bothering me.

When you say 'root is corrupted', I cannot determine how to interpret
that statement, because it seems like a personal interpretation of
something you have seen, rather than being a diagnostic symptom.  I
mean absolutely no offence in saying that.  It's just that one learns
over a period of years that people tend to state their surmises, and
that attempting to do diagnosis on the basis of surmises
(interpretations) rather than raw diagnostic data tends to lead down
dead-ends.

'Will not boot', on the other hand, that is raw diagnostic data.  The
obvious thing to wonder is:  What specifically happened?  What specific
actions were you doing to 'copy the var messages'?  I actually don't
know what the 'var messages' are, though presumably that means something
within /var.  

It's possible that something as simple as a corrupted bootloader
installation is halting boot.  I would be able to tell more if you
provided details about how far boot progresses before something stops
progress, and what information is displayed on-screen.  Even at that,
it's difficult to envision any likely method of copying files from
within /var to a new destination would cause corruption of your
bootloader installation -- but, again, I cannot tell because you didn't
give enough details to understand what you did.

Anyway, let's set those matters aside and move onwards.  

The most important thing is preservation of your vital files that (if I
recall correctly) you had in two MD-type (Linux software RAID) RAID5
arrays, each such logical volume comprising quite a few physical
volumes (partitions).  One of the problems you had during your visit was
that you had no real records of which partitions belonged to which
logical volume.

That would be the first thing I would want to fix, in your shoes.  Any
of a number of specialised live-CD Linux distributions exist for exactly
such purposes.  One that's frequently recommended is GParted Live CD,
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php/ .  You will notice that it
includes a utility called TestDisk, 'primarily designed to help recover
lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these
symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or
human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table)'.

It sounds as if TestDisk would be an appropriate tool to
semi-automatically find all of your MD-type physical volumes and figure
out which belong to which logical volume.  Once you have that
information in front of you, you can and should jot down the information
in a paper notebook (composition book or legal pad), that can serve as
your repository of notes about all significant details you come across
concerning your system.  I highly recommend such notes -- on paper --
about any significantly complex and/or important Linux system.  The day
will come when you will really, really need those notes.


> All drives have check out as good according to seagate's drive utility.
> Have installed a new power supply and cables. All diagnostics indicated
> nothing wrong.
> 
> When I tried to do a fresh in install, and it will not let me delete the
> previous partitions, re-create or accept the previous partitions. Install
> fails when its tries to format.

What you want to do is visit the _other_ virtual consoles during that
process to see more detail.  Ctrl-Alt-Fn (where n=1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) will
take you among the available virtual consoles.  In one or more of the
other virtual consoles, you will see on-screen diagnostics clarifying
_why_ what is failing is failing.


> I'm thinking of boot from live disc and trying to formatting all drives.
> 
> What do you think???

I absolutely endorse your basic approach.  If there is a particular
live CD distribution you are comfortable with, use that one.  I
personally tend to like Aptosid, a Debian-based live CD with
cutting-edge tools and a recent kernel (thus, current drivers).  There
is an offshoot of Aptosid (sort of a schism) called 'Siduction' that 
has been very recently updated, and that is likely to be at least as
good.

Again, sorry about taking a while to get back to you.  You should be
aware that assistance in the open-source community is primarily
available in the various public discussion forums, for a lot of reasons.
CABAL has a low-traffic public mailing list that is its online
discussion forum.  You can join it (and view its back-postings) here:
http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire

Also, not a complaint, but, when you respond with a new topic by
replying to an old saved message, those of us using threaded e-mail
readers will see your message listed right next to the old mail, in this
case hundreds of messages into my inbox, many pages down from the top.  
You probably don't want to do that.


----- End forwarded message -----