I never did get any responses to this query, but instead started over (wiping the system a couple days later and reinstalling (on
a reformatted ext3 partition instead of XFS)).
For the sake of the archives, I'm thinking that bug 239111 may have gotten me (though since all evidence has now been overwritten
I don't think there's any way to confirm that categorically).
~c
charlie derr wrote:
Hi,
I was fiddling with bzr last night for the first time and on one of
my debian sid workstations pulled in the bzr-svn from experimental
(because the one in sid was segfaulting when i tried to pull from a svn
repo that wanted http auth). After noticing that there were some 500 or
so packages left back, I thought I'd work on upgrading most everything
else (to current unstable). I started with:
aptitude install aptitude
which seemed to succeed just fine. Then I kicked off:
aptitude safe-upgrade
just before going to bed. In the morning I found that the system was
totally wonky (here's what I can read from the bottom of the screen
session (I've since rebooted, so can't scroll up unfortunately)):
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output
error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you
root?
E: Could not regain the system lock! (Perhaps another apt or dpkg is
running?)
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output
error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you
root?
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - open (5
Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output
error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you
root?
Current status: 0 updates [-547], 0 new [-15337].
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - open (5
Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
kronk:~# aptitude safe-upgrade
-su: /usr/bin/aptitude: Input/output error
kronk:~#
kronk:~#
kronk:~# halt
-su: halt: command not found
kronk:~# df -h
-su: /bin/df: Input/output error
kronk:~# Read from remote host kronk: Connection reset by peer
Connection to kronk closed.
obviously the final entry was me holding down the power button on the
machine
after rebooting aptitude gave errors (asking to run 'dpkg --configure
-a' which didn't work at all because /usr/bin/dpkg was now an empty
file --- I tried copying /usr/bin/dpkg from a different (working) sid
system but that doesn't seem to be enough to fix it, I'm not getting an
error when I run aptitude about e2fsprogs being improperly installed.
However 'aptitude -f install' doesn't seem to want to fix it, and
'aptitude purge e2fsprogs' doesn't want do much for me either (even when
I type "I am aware that this is a very bad idea" repeatedly in repsonse
to the prompts (because of initscripts depending on e2fsprogs I'm not
able to actually complete a purge no matter what choices I try from the
manual dependency handling choices).
My root filesystem on this machine is xfs (probably that last time I
intentionally do that) and I suspect that an underlying physical hard
drive problem is the original cause of the first error (the disk was
certainly not close to full in any case). If I have to back up some
remaining files from my home directory and wipe and start over, that's
no biggie (as the machine still allows me to SSH (or SCP) out from it
(incoming is not working, it seems there's something a bit wonky with
the networking) so I can still look around for things I want to save
before totally wiping and starting over with a fresh intall). But in
the interest of possibly learning something, are there other things I
could try first to try to resurrect the current brokenness back into a
working system?
thanks so much in advance for any suggestions,
~c
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