[mythtv-users] JFS, MythTV and Machine Check Errors

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Jan 23 17:08:10 UTC 2006


Not directly related to MythTV, but I'm having this problem with a  
Myth box so I thought I'd so if I am alone in this.

I originally set up my machine with a couple of jfs partitions for  
media storage, one 200GB partition on my main system disk and a 500GB  
partition on a software RAID composed of 2 250GB SATAs.

Everything normal, more or less, 'till my main disk crashed and I  
started from scratch again, with a new 250GB system drive.

Upon starting to set up this machine I was getting machine check  
errors/kernel panics. "Can't Sync" was reported along with hex error  
codes. Hmmm... Never had an MCE on this box before, ever.

To make a long story short(er), I finally realized that sometimes the  
jfs partitions get recognized and mounted at boot, and sometimes they  
don't. When they don't an attempt to mount them results in "bad  
superblock". If I re-make the filesystems they will then mount.

I figured out that I am getting the MCEs only when the filesystems do  
not mount, Once they are mounted things seem OK. I suspect this may  
be related to software RAID in some way but I'm not sure how to tell.  
Since the box locks up solid on an MCE there is no way I can get  
mcelog to tell me about the error, as it goes away on a re-boot. (I  
suppose I could write it down and try to get mcelog to decode it).   
There is nothing in the system logs (mce does not do that anymore  
apparently). I really do not think this is a hardware problem.

So: Anybody had flaky experience getting existing jfs partions  
recognized at boot? Any problems with jfs on software RAID? Should I  
try a different filesystem? I'm re-building now with a 2.6.15 kernel  
(just a masochist I guess) so now's the time if I'm going to change.

Just wondering.


Brian Wood
beww at beww.org





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