HELP: FreeBSD 5.2 crashing when doing fsck?

[Mark Blackman]

On 31 Jan 2004, at 21:05, William Cooper wrote:

> Hello again,
>
> I have a FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE machine here, lately I started to run into
> system problems where the machine would completely freeze and had to be
> rebooted, the reboots took a very long time because it decided it 
> wanted
> to fsck the 4 x 120gb hard disks that are connected to it, then after 
> it
> had completed this task the machine would run fine for a few hours (I
> think, I would normally go to bed and find it broken in the morning).
> Today I decided I wanted to find the root of the problem, I have 
> swapped
> different sticks of ram, disconnected the 4x 120gb hard disks, and 
> tried
> various different modes from the kernel loader screen (?) just before 
> it
> boots up to try and fix it.
>
> Then the hangs started to happen earlier, it would only fsck the 
> install
> disk (only disk connected by this time), which is only 20gb and then
> hang within minutes afterwards. I noticed the hang would happen with 
> the
> HDD light on, so next time I booted up I did a 'killall -9 fsck' and
> 'killall -9 fsck_ufs', once them two processes were killed I haven't 
> had
> a problem, and the machine is still running (without a reboot of
> course).
>
> The only thing I can think of is that the mobo is duffed or the 20gb
> hard drive is going :/
>
> Can anyone shed some light on this problem? I really need this box up
> and I'm unable to fix this problem :(

Just to confirm that it's not a bug in FreeBSD 5 with respect to
unusual/new hardware, I'd recommend trying FreeBSD 4.9 (using
some unused hard disk) and see how well it behaves. I think
5.2 is still a bit dangerous to run a critical machine on.

>
> Kit: Abit BP6 running dual 533Mhz Celerons
>
> Uname: FreeBSD deathstar 5.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE #0: Sun Jan 11
> 04:21:45 GMT 20
> 04     root at wv1u.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>
> Any help will be great,
>

Well, HTH.

- Mark

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