Silly mistake - cost an hour before Linux/Club member solved my problem

English Open Chat
1

I attended a GNU/Linux Club meeting (which is one of the clubs run by employees of the organization where I work) and a problem of mine consumed 1/2 of the club’s time :frowning: It was embarrassing as the solution to the problem was obvious.

When I unplaced my Ultrabook at the start of the club meeting, and booted it, the Ultrabook (with openSUSE-12.3) kept booting to run level 1 ! I know nothing about run level 1. I rebooted to Windows8 which worked fine, so that confirmed my SSD drive was likely good. I checked to ensure the openSUSE partition on my SSD drive was not full and I noted I had more than 50 GB free space in /home and more than 15GB free in / . I had thought possibly my / drive was possibly corrupted, so I booted to a liveUSB and then did a fsck on the /dev/sda on my SSD drive, and the fsck passed with flying colours.

At a club members suggestion, I booted to fail safe and obtained this error:
http://thumbnails103.imagebam.com/28702/91b40b287012401.jpg](http://www.imagebam.com/image/91b40b287012401)

which if I had thought about it more, would have pointed me to the problem.

But around that time, one of the club members noted he had seen similar errors when his /tmp was full. I noted that I had checked / and it had lots of space. He re-iterated his point, so I then (in run level 1 ) tried to navigate to /tmp to prove my point. Well, … to my embarrassment /tmp was not there ! Then I started to remember I had deliberately coded in my fstab to have /tmp and /var mounted on my SD-Card (so to preserve SSD drive life). I looked at my SD-Card, and saw it was protruding by 1/4" from my Ultrabook. ie it was NOT seated properly. … Duh … a rather silly faux pas on my part.

I pushed the SD-card (which had /tmp and /var on it) back in to my Ultrabook , ensuring it was properly connected, rebooted and my openSUSE-12.3 booted properly in the nominal ~20 seconds. …

But it was a rather embarassing mistake to make in front of our GNU/Linux club :shame: , and not a mistake that I think I will repeat any time soon. :\

2

Oops :). Not this side of Christmas anyway. Is an SD card always kept in the slot, even when powered off?

3

I nominally never use the SD card drive on an laptop. So I had the bright :Xidea of mounting /var on an SD card so to reduce writes to the SSD drive. And I thus nominally keep the SD card in the SD card slot. Then I forgot I had done such a mount, and did not pay attention to the SD card when I booted. … It was a bit silly on my part. :shame:

4

On 2013-11-06 22:36, oldcpu wrote:
> Then I forgot I had done such a mount, and did not pay attention to the
> SD card when I booted. … It was a bit silly on my part. :shame:

Not really. Everybody does mistakes that later we can not imagine why we
did. But they happen, it is normal. We look at things and we see how
they should be, not how they really are… our mind skips details and
fills them up with “reality” that is not real.

Like that optical trick with the blind spot of the eye. It is a paper
with a circle and a cross. Put the paper at certain distance and
position, and one of them disappears, while the mind fills the blank
with the same color as the paper.

On this particular problem, it is partly the fault of systemd. The old
systemv gave error messages that were easier to interpret. Yes, the info
that /var could not be mounted is there… but it doesn’t leap to the
eye unless you are used to it. If that is what it says… I’m not sure. O:-)

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

5

I am thinking about doing something similar to my wife’s laptop, after the SSD gets installed.
How has this setup worked for you ?

6

On Thu 07 Nov 2013 02:56:01 AM CST, hextejas wrote:

oldcpu;2596139 Wrote:
> I nominally never use the SD card drive on an laptop. So I had the
> bright :Xidea of mounting /var on an SD card so to reduce writes to
> the SSD drive. And I thus nominally keep the SD card in the SD card
> slot. Then I forgot I had done such a mount, and did not pay
> attention to the SD card when I booted. … It was a bit silly on my
> part. :shame:

I am thinking about doing something similar to my wife’s laptop, after
the SSD gets installed.
How has this setup worked for you ?

Hi
I haven’t worried about it on the OCZ Bertex4 128GB device I have, it
has a 5 year (limited?) warranty and has an expected use of 20G writes
per day. It’s been running for 1004hrs and Media_Wearout_Indicator is
still at 100…

Check the drive specs of the device your intending to get, that should
determine whether it’s worth it.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 11 SP3 (x86_64) GNOME 2.28.0 Kernel 3.0.93-0.8-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

7

oldcpu wrote:

> SD-Card (so to preserve SSD drive life). I looked at my SD-Card, and
> saw it was protruding by 1/4" from my Ultrabook. ie it was NOT seated
> properly. … Duh … a rather silly faux pas on my part.
>
Unless someone intentionally applied physical force on the sd card it
wouldn’t pop out
How did it come out in first place? Guess there is a hardware issue here

–
GNOME 3.6.2
openSUSE Release 12.3 (Dartmouth) 64-bit
Kernel Linux 3.7.10-1.16-desktop

8

oldcpu wrote:
>
> At a club members suggestion, I booted to fail safe and obtained this
> error:
> ‘[image: http://thumbnails103.imagebam.com/28702/91b40b287012401.jpg]’
> (http://www.imagebam.com/image/91b40b287012401)
>
I can see the digital camera’s reflection in the pic :slight_smile:
http://www.imagebam.com/image/91b40b287012401

–
GNOME 3.6.2
openSUSE Release 12.3 (Dartmouth) 64-bit
Kernel Linux 3.7.10-1.16-desktop

9

I wonder if silly mistakes come in 3s ? I made another one on a new openSUSE user’s Ultrabook PC.

I had previous (a few days earlier) succeeded in the installation of openSUSE-13.1 RC2 on the Ultrabook (in a dual boot with Windows8) which required some extra knowledge to address UEFI/EFI peculiarities.

Today I was showing them the firewall functionality, how to ssh to another PC, we modified the fstab to reduce writes to the ssd drive, edited an ssh config file to block ‘root’ access, and I attempted to setup a permanent mount to the windows8 NTFS using YaST. I created a /home/username/windows to mount the NTFS and YaST gave me warnings that the Windows8 was hibernated and suggested I not continue (although it did give me an option to ignore the warning). Like an idiot I decided to ignore the warning thinking I knew better. I knew a mount would not harm windows8 and I figured it was safe for /home. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

While a windows8 boot worked, the subsequent reboot to Linux failed, and left us in a state with error messages scrolling constantly and warnings of an emergency mode boot, but it never stopped and the errors kept continuing (mostly too fast to read). After some tail chasing of different failed attempts to recover (including fail safe boot, etc … boot to live USB to check fstab settings etc …) I finally hauled out my digital camera and managed to take pictures/videos of the messages scrolling by.

The messages indicated a partition with a specific label had a problem, noted the default boot fsck (with the default boot arguments to fix) could not fix the problem and recommend fsck be run with no arguments. So after some tail spinning where I did not read the message properly, the actual meaning of the message finally sank in my thick skull, and we rebooted to a liveUSB stick, ran fsck against the /home partition and fixed the problem. The fsck fixed a number of bad blocks on the ext4 /home.

This problem was all caused by my silly attempt to force the mount a hibernated NTFS drive in /home/username/windows.

After this the PC booted again, openSUSE-13.1 RC2 worked fine.

But this silly miss adventure of mine cost 30 to 45 minutes of my and my colleagues time. I know that may not sound like much, but for me that’s a lot of time. I rarely have such problems, and to have two silly mistakes in the same week was likely a healthy hit on my ego, to force me to be a bit less cavalier with my GNU/Linux use.

I learned a lot, but frankly, I would rather learn less and not have such problems :smiley:

Once again - another silly mistake - hopefully not to be repeated.

10

On 2013-11-07 20:56, oldcpu wrote:

> While a windows8 boot worked, the subsequent reboot to Linux failed, and
> left us in a state with error messages scrolling constantly and warnings
> of an emergency mode boot, but it never stopped and the errors kept
> continuing (mostly too fast to read).

You found a bug in systemd -> bugzilla! :wink:

> Once again - another silly mistake - hopefully not to be repeated.

It happens to us all.

Hey, I have been looking for a notebook for two weeks, uselessly. I
suddenly found it yesterday, by chance. The funny thing is that it was
in its proper place, that is, what I decided a month or two ago that it
was the proper place. Then I forgot what the "proper place"™ was.

:slight_smile:

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

11

Let me say that it is best to not go crazy trying to “fix” disk problems when openSUSE will not start. Just one unclean shutdown of a NTFS partition, which you may not realize exits, can stop openSUSE cold from starting. It has occured to me before.

Thank You,