I'm running Debian/Trixie on an AMD64 workstation. I've lost the ability
to see the root directory even when I am logged in as root (su -).
This has been happening intermittently for several months. I initially
thought it might be related to failing NVME drive that was part of a
RAID1 array that is mounted as "/" but I replaced the device and the
problem is still happening.
I had been able to fix it by booting to SystemRescue and running an fsck
on the device but it didn't work this time. The device checks out OK
(even when using fsck -/dev/mdx -f) but I still can't list the root. "ls
-l /" just hangs, as do any attempts to see the root directory in a
graphical file manager. In dolphin this means there is nothing in the
folders - and since that is the default starting point I have to
manually enter a folder name (e.g. /home/me) in the location bar to be
able to see anything - but even then the folders panel remains empty.
Even running commands like df -h hang because they can't access the root
folder. However the system is otherwise running normally.
Strangely, in the past simply booting to a rescue shell then exiting
would also work. I'd usually try to do an fsck on the raid device but
that would always fail because it was mounted.
The only thing I noticed that was unusual was I rebooted after
installing the latest Trixie updates this morning. That took about 10
minutes to shut down - 6 of which were spent waiting for a drkonqi
process to finish. There was also a systemd message really late in the
shutdown about /dev/md0 but that's not the root device.
I'm used to Linux taking its time to shutdown lately so I don't think
this was related. The systemd shutdown just seems to be easily delayed.
Any ideas on how I can restore my ability to see the root directory?
