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marc.aronson
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 Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 10:15 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
California
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I am running LINHES 6.0.3. Recently I am starting to see the following error during boot:
Quote: Unable to create/detect root device '/dev/disk/by-uuid/c6a4c5b9-e3d9-4e80-8174-ebb0eabdef38'
Dropping to a recovery shell...
If the device '...' get created while you are here,
try adding 'rootdelay=8' or higher to the kernel command line
I then "cd /dev/disk", type "echo *" and the only directory I see is "by-path". I then reboot and things start properly.
This is a major problem because my system powers down between recordings, so I no longer have reliable recordings. It appears to be happening a few times a week now.
Does anyone have any insights into the root cause of this intermittent problem? Is it a sign of failing hardware or something else? Thanks!
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 11:36 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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This might be solved -- I added the "rootdelay=8" even though the identified device was not generated while waiting at the prompt. Multiple reboots have run without a problem. I will wait a week or two before I declare victory.
For anyone else that needs to do this:
1. Login as root
2. Edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst
3. Look for the lines that start with the word "kernel". My menu.1st file has 4 of them.
4. Add the following string to the end of each of the "kernel" lines: rootdelay=8
5. Save the file and reboot.
As an example, one of my kernel lines now looks like this:
Code: kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/c6a4c5b9-3ed9-4e80-8174-ebb0eabdef38 ro init=/sbin/runit console=tty1 rootdelay=8
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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jzigmyth
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 11:54 am |
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Joined: Thu Mar 02, 2006 5:42 pm
Posts: 410
Location:
middleton wi usa atsc
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Just tossing out ideas here:
If it used to work fine and nothing else has been changed, it might be that the hard drive is taking longer that it used to, to spin up from power off and get itself initialized. -possibly- indicating a future failure.
I recall that some old motherboard bioses had an adjustable bootup delay in their menus for slow starting hard drives. Don't recall seeing that lately, though.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 10:03 pm |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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jzigmyth wrote: If it used to work fine and nothing else has been changed, it might be that the hard drive is taking longer that it used to, to spin up from power off and get itself initialized. -possibly- indicating a future failure.
I also have that concern. Here is my current status:
1. I ran a stress test where I had the system reboot itself 8 times in a row via a script that essentially did a "sleep 60; shutdown -r now". All 8 reboots passed. Before I made the change a "shutdown -r" would fail once out of every 3-4 reboots.
2. I then ran another script that did 10 full power cycles of the machine via "sleep 60; set_bios_wakeup_time_for_1_minute_from_now; shutdown -h now". All 10 passed.
So I suspect my problem is solved, but I share your concern about the possibility of a failing hard drive. I've did an image backup of the system before I did my original post, so I am OK on that front and my recordings are all stored on a separate NAS.
I'll post an update in a few weeks after things have run for a while. In the meantime, if there are any more thoughts I'm interested...
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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tjc
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 11:17 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Go through and double check all your connections. I've seen a loose HD cable to cause flakey behavior on more than one occasion.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 2:20 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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tjc wrote: Go through and double check all your connections. I've seen a loose HD cable to cause flakey behavior on more than one occasion.
Good suggestion, but no dice. The cables were all firm. As a precaution, I replaced the SATA cable on the hard drive with a new one, threw it into the "shutdown -r" test script and it failed on the second reboot.
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Wed Apr 06, 2011 11:29 pm |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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After 3-weeks of stability I've had the problem again. Sigh... I will try swapping the disk drive this weekend.
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2011 10:54 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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The plot thickens. I have two different mythtv boxes both exhibiting this problem. One box uses a SATA boot drive and is running 6.0.3. The other box has an IDE boot drive and is running 6.0.4. I no longer believe this is really a hardware problem and very strongly suspect that it is something else.
I do have my machine shutdown when it is idle. Is anyone else doing this and are you having any problems. It was 100% reliable back on r5.5...
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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tjc
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Posted: Sun May 22, 2011 2:11 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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What is the spin up time on your drives? (hint: smartctl will tell you) The WD green drives and other low power or quiet drives can take longer to spin up, and even may spin back down if left idle for 8 seconds.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 10:31 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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tjc wrote: What is the spin up time on your drives? (hint: smartctl will tell you) The WD green drives and other low power or quiet drives can take longer to spin up, and even may spin back down if left idle for 8 seconds.
Unfortunately, there is no "smartctl" in LINHES 6.0.4 and pacman -Q doesn't show it in the list.
The drive in the 6.0.4 machine is an IBM (Hitachi?) Deskstar EIDE drive. The drive in the 6.0.3 machine is a WD Green drive.
Any idea who to easily get smartctl in 6.0.4?
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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graysky
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 12:43 pm |
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Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location:
/dev/null
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You could attempt to build it from Arch's ABS but that might be difficult since LinHES isn't Arch.... perhaps someone else can help you.
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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 2:59 pm |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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I just changed menu.1st so that the system choose the root drive by device ("/dev/sda1") rather than by UUID. I then threw the system into a loop where everytime it boots it schedules a restart in 2 minutes, pauses 45 seconds and then does a "shutdown -h". I Left it running and it completed 88 successful reboots before I stopped it.
Is there a reason that boot by specific device name would be more reliable then boot my UUID?
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Marc
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tjc
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 9:42 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
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marc.aronson wrote: Any idea who to easily get smartctl in 6.0.4?
Code: pacman -Sy smartmontools
That should do the trick.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 8:21 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
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I just changed my other system's menu.1st so that it also chooses the root drive by device ("/dev/sda1") rather than by UUID. I then threw the system into a loop where everytime it boots it schedules a restart in 3 minutes, pauses 45 seconds and then does a "shutdown -h". I Left it running while I slept and it completed 126 reboots before I stopped it.
More time will be required to determine if this is the real fix. I will report back when I learn more.
TJC, here is the output of smartctl -a. I don't see where it lists the spin up time. I does look like all of the thresholds suggests that the drives is healthy.
Marc
Code: smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: SAMSUNG HD103SI
Serial Number: S1VSJ9BS500659
Firmware Version: 1AG01113
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 3b
Local Time is: Mon May 30 07:04:36 2011 PDT
==> WARNING: May need -F samsung or -F samsung2 enabled; see manual for details.
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (12802) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 214) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 23) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x003f) SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 082 082 011 Pre-fail Always - 6130
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 093 093 000 Old_age Always - 6883
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 253 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0025 100 100 015 Pre-fail Offline - 13832
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 3841
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 581
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
183 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
184 Unknown_Attribute 0x0033 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
188 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 079 062 000 Old_age Always - 21 (Lifetime Min/Max 21/21)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 078 061 000 Old_age Always - 22 (Lifetime Min/Max 21/22)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 318413
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 8 -
# 2 Short offline Aborted by host 90% 8 -
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
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Marc
The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
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marc.aronson
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 8:35 am |
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location:
California
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marc.aronson wrote: TJC, here is the output of smartctl -a. I don't see where it lists the spin up time. I does look like all of the thresholds suggests that the drives is healthy.
OK - I did some more reading -- let's see if I have this right. The line:
Code: [quote]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 082 082 011 Pre-fail Always - 6130
1. Current and worst-case values of 082 indicate the spin-up-time is healthy. If those values ever fall below 011 it means the drive is in trouble.
2. The RAW_VALUE of 6130 is the time it takes to spin up -- my guess is it is in milliseconds, so probably 6.132 seconds.
My most recent test on this machine (603) was run with rootdelay=1; the most recent test on the other machine (604) was run with rootdelay=4. As a reminder, I have seen boot failures with the following values of rootdelay on the 603 machine: Unspecific, 8 & 16.
Marc
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Marc
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