Tuesday, June 16, 2009

fs weirdness

So I was in the middle of refreshing my vmbuiler sources when I got an out-of-disk error in the middle of the bzr pull. Fine, so I fired up Filelight, excluded /media and checked to see how much was being used... 5GBs. On a 19GB partition. Feeling this to be a bit odd I figured I'd rather extend the partition another gigabyte. I fire up the Ubuntu partiton, load gparted, and.... it reports the Debian partition as being 5GBs used. Odd. So I extend the partition back a gig, which takes a great deal of time. That's done, so I remount the new debian, fixup grub, restart, and get a kernel panic.

It is at this point that I remember that I had hibernated Debian instaed of shutting it down, and then I moved the filesystem out from under it. So I reboot again, it works. First thing I do after login is check "df"... and the drive reports 5GBs used.

I'm not a master at kernel internals but I have at least part of an inkling that the missing 14 gigabytes of space had something to do with hibernating and restoring the machine multiple times.

In other news it looks like there is a branch vmbuilder-gui, which I'll have to look into sometime.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, you really really don't want to touch anything the hibernated system has mounted while it's hibernated. This is the best that could happen to you -- actual filesystem damage was expected.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @johannes: suprisingly no FS damage, which is good because I have my vmbuilder git repo on that partition.

    speaking of which is there a way to force Debian or Ubuntu to boot cold, ignoring hibernation data?

    another abuse of hibernation... I managed to create multiple dead USB drive device files in /dev that wouldn't umount. how? keep a usb drive mounted while you hibernate, remove it when Debian isn't running, plug it back in and Debian happily creates a new device file ignoring the 3 others it already made.

    my gnome desktop was littered with dead "BIGSTICK" drives.

    ReplyDelete