Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:38 AM, daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 February 2010 12:33, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> So I got my wife's machine booted today using a install disk and
>> played a bit with e2fsck. The machine stopped being happy last night
>> due to some sort of corruption on the /var partition. e2fsck
>> complained about 3 or 4 files and then repaired the partition. The
>> machine booted cleanly as far as I can tell.
>>
>> So, something went bad and I managed to sneak around it for a while
>> and now I'm sort of living with the machine wondering what to do.
>>
>> Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of
>> knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come
>> back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely.
>>
>> As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to
>> go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and
>> wait?
>>
>> We've got decent personal data backups as well as basic /etc data.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mark
>>
>
> I reconsidered your problem, and I actually wonder if emerging world
> is a valid notion in this case, as the world file is under /var and
> this is reported as corrupt.
>
> In this sense, it may be entirely non-trivial to regenerate (without
> backup) the correct world-file for a system.
>
> Am I out in the deep end, or is this, in fact, the critical point that
> needs consideration here?
>
> ~daid

Hi daid,
   In general you are correct. If I didn't have a copy of the world
file then it would be a bit hit and miss. In this case I do have it
saved elsewhere so it's actually quite easy.

   This failure is more (it seems) a few bad blocks on one partition
and not a total drive failure.

   I'm leaning toward a new /var partition and just ignoring the
partition that has problems. It will sit on the disk but it's only
10GB out of 160GB so it's not the end of the world by any means.

   Thanks!

- Mark