On 30 March 2010 13:32, Markie <mark.curtis.1...@googlemail.com> wrote: >[snip] > Basically what I could deduce from the errors was that a file I had ftp-ed > onto the machine yesterday was pointing to the same disc block as one of the > gdm log files. >
This can happen sometimes when, for example, there's a power glitch while the machine is writing the file to its disc. > Fortunately I have a external USB with ubuntu installed so after making a > note of which files were clashing, I booted from that and mounted the drive. > I deleted one of the files (not the gdm log) and then unmounted to drive and > run fsck against it choosing the "y" when prompted to fix. Now I can boot > the machine normally off the internal hard drive. > You don't need to manually delete the file. fsck will do it for you. And of the two, I would have deleted the log file! Depends how easily you can get the other file back (or another copy of it anyway). > I have some questions on this; > > 1. How could two files ever point to one disc block? Answered above. > 2. If I faced this error where would boot time fsck errors be written to? They normally get written to the screen while the machine is booting. They might also get written to a log file, but I'm not sure. > 3. Which logs would show any errors such as this so I could check before > finding out on next boot I had a problem? As far as I know, you don't find out about disc/filesystem problems until you get the error message. Some people swear by SMART monitoring, but Google wrote a report to say that it was fairly unreliable at predicting disc failures (both false-positives (saying a disc will fail when it keeps working for a significant time) and false-negatives (saying the disc is fine, then it goes bang a millisecond later))! They had a reasonably large number of disc drives that they analysed for the report too. Cofion/Regards, Neil. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
