Public bug reported:
Sometimes my ext4 root filesystem corrupts itself (bug 675416), and I
can't boot far enough for the routine, automated fsck run. Normally I
fix that with a manual fsck from a live-CD boot. This time, using a
Maverick live CD, that didn't work. It failed with EBUSY, giving output
along the lines of "device or resource busy" and "partition mounted or
locked by other process?"
The partition was not mounted when I tried this, and not shown in
/proc/mounts either, so simply unmounting it didn't help. I tried
umount -a to be sure, but that didn't do it either. Based on the
version number and an strace run this is also *not* the double-
exclusive-lock-while-figuring-out-block-size bug that fsck used to hit
in the Debian Lenny timeframe.
According to lsof, there were 3 file handles open on the partition's
/dev entry. If I recall correctly, the process owning these file
handles was called jbd2/sda3-8 (and its parent pid was 2). Discussions
I found while searching suggest that there may have been a hanging
"mount" command, but I didn't think of grep'ing "ps" output at the time.
The solution suggested online was to boot off a Slax live CD and run
fsck from there. That worked for me. The last one or two times this
happened I happened to use a Fedora live CD and before that, CDs from
older Ubuntu versions. The attempt with the Maverick CD is the only
time I was unable to recover in that way.
For a time I thought it must have been a hardware problem, but a dusty
little OS X partition on the same machine (MacBook Pro, June 2009)
booted successfully, and an overnight checkup in the shop revealed no
hardware problems. My system is running again, which also means I'm no
longer able to reproduce the problem at will.
** Affects: ubuntu
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/697641
Title:
Can't fsck broken partition from live CD
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