"Read-only file system" on startup, "Error in service module

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I’m running openSUSE 11.1 dual-booting with XP Professional on a Thinkpad T500 notebook.

When I boot into Linux, I get a bunch of “Read-only file system” messages in the startup messages. Then either:

  1. It gives me the GUI login screen. When I type in my password and hit enter, it freezes. tty1 appears to be in the middle of something (it’s loading something and has a blinking cursor). tty2 only gives me a blinking cursor. When I return to tty7 often the top part of the screen is messed up.

  2. It gives me the GUI login screen. I type in my password and hit enter; the screen blanks, but the cursor still works. Instead of loading my KDE, it sits there for a while then drops me back to tty1. tty1 and tty2 have login prompts. tty7 shows only a blinking cursor. When I try to log in as either myself or root, it tells me “Error in service module”.

  3. It doesn’t give me anything on tty7 at all, just console. Again, trying to log in tells me “Error in service module”.

Sometimes I also get a ton of error messages repeating along the lines of “/sbin/mingetty: Successful” and then “/sbin/mingetty: Input/output error”. This spams my screen and then I get error messages about Id “number” spawning too many processes and being shut down for 5 minutes. Eventually it tells me there are no processes remaining on this runlevel.

I can reboot using Ctrl+Alt+Delete sometimes. Sometimes that doesn’t work.

When I boot into Windows, it gives me a BSOD (KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR with STOP: 0x0000007A (0xE1DA7708, 0xC0000056, 0xBF8D8000, 0x223B0860), and I can’t find any info on what the 0xC0000056 status code is, so that isn’t particularly helpful).

Sometimes it starts trying to hit the hard disk, the hard disk light blinks on and off evenly and I can hear it. Problems in both my systems suggest it’s a hardware error, but I’ve run memory tests and hard disk tests and everything comes up clean. I can mount the drive from a live CD just fine (which I had to do to retrieve my project work).

Any ideas on what normally causes this kind of error?

#2

No idea what causes it,but, have you run fsck on the drive yet ? Do you have S.M.A.R.T. enabled on the drive ? if so,check the S.M.A.R.T. logs as well

Andy

#3

The error KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR is most probably due to bad blocks on your drive. I suggest you backup your data and replace the drive asap

Geoff

#4

Are you sure geoffo? I recently had a hdd problem, eventually it crashed and then the backupped files appeared to be corrupt: files with right size but no content, file-size errors etc.
But you are right, DATA_INPAGE_ERROR in 99% of cases is caused by bad blocks, i.e. a desintegrating hard disk.

#5

I’ve run fsck on my SUSE partition and chkdsk on my Windows, as well as SeaTools (the drive’s a Seagate) and the PC Doctor hard disk diagnostic on the disk. Everything comes up clean.

Inexplicably, after about 24 hours crashing on every boot (and there were a lot of them), the problem seems to have gone away. I’m still going to call up Lenovo though, especially since I’ve been having intermittent BSODs in Windows for weeks (last time I called them they blamed everything on their buggy graphics drivers).