Savefile difficulty at boot

[dr__Dan]

Hi all,
Recently I have had trouble with a laptop not loading the savefolder correctly. Watching closely, there is a message "Stackable Filesystem: Failed to mount read-write, attempting to mount read-only". I've made another savefolder on the same partition, but I want to repair this one if possible. Any suggestions on where I would look?

Thank you,

Dan

[Clarity]

HI @dr__Dan

Awhile back, I had a similar occurrence on FD v811. It turned out that a e2fsck -f /dev/... fixed that "ro" condition that I was getting at desktop arrival.

Not sure if this will work. After running, at reboot, be sure to direct the boot to the proper savefile=...

Hope this is helpful in some way.

[step]

Dan, Clarity's suggestion is a good starting point. Here are the steps somewhat in more detail. Select the "without savefolder" boot menu label and boot. You will see the drive icon where you keep your old savefolder. Make sure it isn't mounted (no green mark on it). The first word of the icon label is your device name, say "sda1", "sdb3" or whatever. Then /dev/sda1 (/dev/sdb3...) is the path to the filesystem to be repaired. Open a console and type fsck /dev/sdXY (replace XY with the correct letter and number). The filesystem will be repaired, if possible and needed; fsck might prompt for confirmation. If all goes well, try booting with the repaired savefolder. If it still doesn't work we'll take it to the next step.

[dr__Dan]

Thank you both. I had done that already (dofsck is typically in my boot parameters), but I did it again and specifically. The filesystem is well.
During the testing, I noticed another unexpected message during boot:

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mount : mounting aufs on /aufs/new_root failed:  Invalid argument

I'm hoping this will allow a relatively simple tweak to accomplish a repair, but I'll wait for your input.

With gratitude,
Dan

[Clarity]

AT this point, IIRC,

• you have more than 1 save-session folders on the save 'device'.

• And at boot-time, you direct the boot to either via use of the savefile= parm use in the boot stanza

Question
Is the 'device' with your sessions in a 'ro' state upon desktop arrival? (seen via the terminal's mount command)

Curious, to make sure I am following your status

[step]

Dan, please reboot with option debuginitrd appended to your boot options. Once the Desktop is running, start a terminal and run bugreport.sh, take out what you don't want to share with me from the resulting archive, and send me the archive, don't attach it here.

Are you getting the same errors when you boot with the new, good savefile? Can you send me another bug report when there are no errors?

[dr__Dan]

@Clarity, yes, you recall correctly. When booting to the old savefolder, it never reaches the desktop, so I can't answer for that, but with the new, functioning savefolder it is mounted (automatically, since the save is there) rw, and is completely typical as far as I have seen.

@step, I will try booting with debuginitrd with the old and current saves, and report back. As I clarified to Clarity, the broken save does not make it to the desktop, but it does spit out an overwhelming quantity of failures, probably related to not being able to write.

It may be some while before I can perform the tests.

Thanks for the interest and help!

Dan

[step]

@step, I will try booting with debuginitrd with the old and current saves, and report back. As I clarified to Clarity, the broken save does not make it to the desktop

With the instructions I gave you I'm trying to see what's happening inside initrd that generates all those errors. I don't need to get to a full desktop. So also append pfix=nox to the boot options. If you're lucky enough, you will get to the Linux text console, and be able to run bugreport.sh from there. Then you can use cp -a bug_report_folder_path destination_folder_path(1) to copy the bug report to a disk or USB flash drive(2), and shut down the system with halt. Then you can boot to full desktop, and audit and send me the bug report data you just saved.

(1) Mind that destination_folder_path must exist and must start with /mnt/sdXY, with X a letter and Y a digit.

(2) Use a USB flash drive if you can. Plug it in before boot, hopefully it will be auto-mounted. Use mount to find out if it is mounted and what its path stem is, like /mnt/sdLD, with L greater than the last letter in the list of fixed drive path stems, and Y a digit. If it i sn't mounted, you'll need to mount it yourself, with lsblk to find out the NAME of your unmounted flash drive device, say sdLD in column 1,NAME. Then mount it with mkdir /mnt/sdLD; mount /dev/sdLD /mnt/sdLD. Replace L and D with the actual letter and digit of your flash drive.

[Clarity]

@dr__Dan on the "good" save-session's desktop, would you post what the terminal command mount shows. And, if you could indicate which line comes up 'rw' for the good drive that you refer, please.

[dr__Dan]

@Clarity, here is the output:

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# mount
proc on 18 type proc (rw,28)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,relatime)
devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=2963944k,nr_inodes=740986,mode=755)
tmpfs on /aufs/pup_init type tmpfs (ro,relatime,mode=755)
/kernel-modules.sfs (deleted) on /aufs/kernel-modules type squashfs (ro,relatime)
/dev/sda4 on /aufs/devbase type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/loop1 on /aufs/pup_ro type squashfs (ro,relatime)
/dev/sda2 on /aufs/devsave type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda2 on /aufs/pup_save type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
aufs on / type aufs (rw,relatime,si=d2607e6c0268387)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,relatime,gid=3,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,relatime,mode=777)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup (rw,relatime,cpuset,cpu,cpuacct,blkio,memory,devices,freezer,net_cls,perf_event,net_prio,pids)
/dev/sda4 on /mnt/sda4 type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/sda2 type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)

@step, I put in a USB flash drive, booted with the old savefolder with debuginitrd and pfix=nox parameters. I had to Ctrl-C out of the boot process to the terminal. mount showed that the flash drive was not mounted, so I mounted it to /mnt/sdb1 successfully and verified it was there.

I ran bugreport.sh through to completion, making note of the temporary and permanent files, but apparently neither of them was successfully saved, and could not be copied to the flash drive. I tried re-running bugreport.sh, but used Ctrl-C at the review stage to try to get just the temporary file, but without success. I realized that writing them would not be possible, so I unmounted the flash drive and remounted it to /tmp, where it is writable, and re-ran bugreport.sh, again stopping it at the review stage, but the temporary file was not there under /tmp.

I used halt to shutdown, but it stopped responding after reboot: System halted, and I had to use the power button to turn off the laptop.

Do you have a further suggestion for how I might proceed?

Dan

[Clarity]

@dr__Dan
When you noticed the 'ro' problem, which of these 2 lines exhibited your problem?

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/dev/sda2 on /aufs/devsave type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda2 on /aufs/pup_save type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)

[dr__Dan]

Hi @Clarity, I booted into the faulty savefolder again and re-ran mount. The output is the same as posted before.

Prior to the sudden inability to reach the desktop, there was no indication of a problem, so I am not able to answer your specific question. As nearly as I can tell, there is some flag or similar condition that is preventing the AUFS system from behaving properly. I hope that is meaningful to and useful you.

Dan