Re: [MiNT] Serious problem with Minixfs

[johnnie ligotage <johnnie@ligotage.demon.co.uk>]

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Martin Nightowl Byttebier wrote:
> Today I ran into a serious problem on my Hades.
> For some reason Cab 2.7e crashed when I try to launch it (with MiNT-ovl) 
> and took down the whole system.

Yes! A very nasty problem. I have 2.5 here, and it does the same sort of
thing. Were you running Apache to look at some web docs on your local box?
I've been developing some cgi scripts using an Apache port compiled with
the proxy module that I put on my home page, but have given up using cab
to check them, as it eventually takes out my root partition and takes me
half an hour to get it back. I'm using Franks latest ext2fs.

I would guess that it is the ovl. Maybe when it tries to resolve a
hostname? I don't know, but CAB here is set up to keep well away from
from my *nix partitions, but it will trash the root, eventually. CAB's
cache is on a TOSFS, so I don't think that is affecting anything. When I
was running apache as a caching proxy server - great for speed - it was
always a cache file that e2fsck would complain about. I have since
disabled that, but still it would trash.

> Nothing serious I thought so I rebooted the Hades. As expected I got some 
> messages at boottime saying that my minixfs partitions weren't cleanly 
> unmounted but right after this when the system tried to run fsck on my 
> first minix the system halted for some time, then I got this horrible 
> message: minix-FS (L): root inode is not a directory?
> (Drive 'L' is were all the MiNT stuff is located)

If you were using ext2fs, you would get a similar message saying try
running 'e2fsck -b 8193 l' or similar. I don't think you can do this with
minix-fs.

> As I had a very recent backup of that drive I took the easiest way and 
> recreated a new minixfs.

Very sensible.

> 
> I wonder if there was a better way to bring back alive that drive?

Try the ext2fs: and run Franks 'fscheck.sh' from your mint.cnf. That would
allow you greater security, especially if you copy a few other useful
utils to c:\mint\bin (or wherever) like reboot, debugfs, cp, ls, rm, grep,
mv, sh (this is purely a personal selection) and rename them to *.ttp. You
should then limit the path at boot-time to just \boot\mint\bin or
c:\mint\bin and change all the commands in fscheck.sh to *.ttp. I even get
fscheck.ttp to grep \boot\mint\etc\fstab for my drives (and link
/etc/fstab to it).

> For your information. I'm using freeMiNT 1.15.4b and minixfs-0.72

I think we'll find it is independant of the os version etc, unless it has
only started to happen since 1.15.1 or so.

Salut/.

J/.
__
John Blakeley