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#217911 - 08/06/2004 05:36 Several problems all at once :-(
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
This all seemd to start at the weekend when my PC crashed during an upload. I now get these problems:

1) When powering up the Empeg it gets as far as "Building music databases", makes noises for a while as if it's doing something, but eventually the drives stop and it doesn't go any further. It's gone past that a couple of times, and will happily continue playing the playlist that was loaded before, but going down the menu to Playlists you find there aren't any.

2) When it's playing (as above) EmpegFace & CharcoalGrey's interfaces work fine, apart from the above-mentioned lack of playlists visible.

3) Emplode can see the Empeg and starts to connect, but gets to "Checking media" then says "Waiting" and then crashes.

4) And I can't find my damned serial cable at the moment !

Any ideas ??

Cheers,

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217912 - 08/06/2004 05:44 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Any ideas ??

Find (or buy) a damned serial cable! You need to run fsck on the empeg, outside the player.
_________________________
-- roger

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#217913 - 08/06/2004 05:58 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Agreed. The fact that you are getting a "building" instead of "loading" databases at boot means that your regular database file is corrupt or missing. You need to correct the disk problems, and that is only possible with the developer version and a terminal session.
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Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217914 - 08/06/2004 07:51 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
OK, OK, found the serial cable, applied the developer image, it won't drop to the shell though. Tried booting up with just the 10Gb drive and it works OK - did as per the FAQ and I could see it in Emplode, re-sync, etc, etc.

However, if I boot up with both drives (reardless of which is drive 0), or with just the 40Gb, it whizzes straight past the point where I can get at the shell prompt and ends up stuck at the "Building music databases" screen. Pressing "q" at any point after this part:

"Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player"

has no effect on the player. The developer image has now been applied independantly to both drives, but it seems to make no difference. When it's trying to start up I get lots of messages like

"Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,4)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 4185227054, count = 1"

If I can't get to the shell I'm a bit snookered, aren't I ?

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217915 - 08/06/2004 07:54 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
You can always press control-c during the boot cycle. That should drop you to shell. Then turn on swap (swapon /swapfile), unmount and check all of your filesystems (umount /drive0; umount /drive1; fsck -fay /; fsck -fay /dev/hda4; fsck -fay /dev/hdc4) and then reboot. You will still get that building databases the first time, but you should be able to go into shell normally then and correct it by hand.
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217916 - 08/06/2004 08:04 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
Ahhh !!! Ctrl-C seems to have done the trick, things are happening, I'll report back in a minute :-D

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217917 - 08/06/2004 15:30 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
OK, so "a minute" turned into several hours. It got through the first FSCK fairly quickly (couple of hours), then gave a message about duplicate blocks and started again. I think it was blocks, this was quite some time ago now. Anyway, here we are, seven and a half hours after it started and it's *still* running. Is this normal ? It seems to be checking through inodes one by one and is currently up to about 260,000.

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217918 - 08/06/2004 16:14 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
That sounds rather ominous. Did you have any other trouble with the disks that would point to a bad cable or header? Do you have the music backed up (it might be easier / faster to rebuild the drive)?
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217919 - 08/06/2004 16:53 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
tfabris
carpal tunnel

Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31597
Loc: Seattle, WA
It got through the first FSCK fairly quickly (couple of hours), then gave a message about duplicate blocks and started again.
This does not sound right. A couple of hours is not "fairly quickly" for a FSCK on typical empeg drives.

Please double check all the steps in the FAQ entry about the building music databases error, in particular paying attention to the part where it says to rule out disk drive hardware trouble because that might be the root cause.
_________________________
Tony Fabris

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#217920 - 09/06/2004 02:17 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: tfabris]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
Hi again - thanks for your help on this !

It seems to boot up and run fine if I only use the 10Gb drive, so I've removed that and put it somewhere safe for now. I hope that's not going to cause any problems.

Running from just the 40Gb drive, it *appears* to boot correctly but does not have any playlists available. Looking at the output in Hyperterminal (and bearing in mind I'm not really a computer person) it all seems reasonable apart from this bit:

I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
EXT2-fs: ide0(3,4): couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features.
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as ext2 but got error 22
Error mounting partitions (possibly already mounted)
Remounting first music partition read-only
No primary hard disk
Remounting second music partition read-only
No secondary hard disk


So it's booting up, but still can't find the drive ?? If worst comes to worst I can just rebuild the drive, but I don't have backups for quite a lot of music on there.

TIA,

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217921 - 09/06/2004 03:04 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
EXT2-fs: ide0(3,4): couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features

It appears to be finding the disk, because it seems to be reading the partition table. The error about No primary hard disk is misleading -- it probably refers to the fact that the partition couldn't be mounted.

As to why the partition couldn't be mounted, I don't know. This is starting to look like some serious corruption.

Can you post the entire boot log from Hyperterminal? Use the Transfer/Capture Text option. This option asks for a text file to save the incoming log as. Once you've given it a name, plug in the player.

Then post it here as an attachment (you might need to ZIP it first).
_________________________
-- roger

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#217922 - 09/06/2004 03:51 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
OK, here we go, file attached.


Attachments
217209-empeg_ht.txt (212 downloads)

_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217923 - 09/06/2004 04:38 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
OK. It appears that the cables and so on are fine:

Probing primary interface...

hda: IC25N040ATCS04-0, ATA DISK drive
(repeats)
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IC25N040ATCS04-0, 38154MB w/1768kB Cache, CHS=4864/255/63


It also appears that your partition table is fine.

Partition check:

hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4


Your root filesystem is also OK:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.


Your music partition isn't:

EXT2-fs: ide0(3,4): couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features.

Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as ext2 but got error 22


Can you drop to a shell prompt on the player? Press Ctrl+C once the player's running.

Once you're there, can you run the following:

fdisk -l /dev/hda


(that's a small-L), and post the results?

_________________________
-- roger

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#217924 - 09/06/2004 04:55 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
empeg:/empeg/bin# fdisk -l /dev/hda


Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 5 40131 5 Extended
/dev/hda2 6 10 40162+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 11 13 24097+ 10 OPUS
/dev/hda4 14 4864 38965657+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda5 1 3 24034+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 4 5 16033+ 82 Linux swap
empeg:/empeg/bin#
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217925 - 09/06/2004 04:57 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
This is now waaaay over my head but the help is MUCH appreciated !!

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217926 - 09/06/2004 05:29 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Well, that looks fine. That leaves us with corruption of the filesystem on the music partition.

Try running the fsck instructions from the FAQ again. If it seems to be taking a long time, then you've probably got irrepairable damage to the disk surface. At that point, we're looking at salvaging what we can.
_________________________
-- roger

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#217927 - 09/06/2004 05:30 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Salvaging... If you have backups of all of your music and files, it might be easier to rebuild the drives.
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217928 - 09/06/2004 05:49 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
I get the following, and I think it might be bad news....


empeg:/empeg/bin# ro
mount: /drive0 not mounted already, or bad option
empeg:/empeg/bin# umount /dev/hda4
umount: /dev/hda4: not found
empeg:/empeg/bin# swapon /swapfile
Adding Swap: 16028k swap-space (priority -1)
empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda5 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/hda5: 1514/4096 files (0.5% non-contiguous), 9457/16384 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /dev/hda4
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda4 is mounted.
fsck.ext2: Filesystem revision too high while trying to open /dev/hda4
The filesystem revision is apparently too high for this version of e2fsck.
(Or the filesystem superblock is corrupt)

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>




I don't have backups of a lot of the stuff here so it'd be nice to recover whatever I can, but it's not the end of the world if I lose it.

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217929 - 09/06/2004 05:50 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Salvaging... If you have backups of all of your music and files, it might be easier to rebuild the drives.

sundayjumper already covered that:

If worst comes to worst I can just rebuild the drive, but I don't have backups for quite a lot of music on there.

_________________________
-- roger

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#217930 - 09/06/2004 05:51 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Are you running the ext3 hack?

Edit - Roger: Sorry. I didn't see that. This should be salvageable, though.


Edited by pgrzelak (09/06/2004 06:37)
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217931 - 09/06/2004 05:51 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
That doesn't look good. Your superblock is corrupt. Does anyone know how to work out where the spares are put?
_________________________
-- roger

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#217932 - 09/06/2004 06:03 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Can you run a mke2fs with the -n option, so that it doesn't actually do anything, but shows you what it would do and where it would place the superblocks???

Edit: From the manpage...

-n causes mke2fs to not actually create a filesystem, but display what it would do if it were to create a filesystem. This can be used to determine the location of the backup superblocks for a particular filesystem, so long as the mke2fs parameters that were passed when the filesystem was originally created are used again. (With the -n option added, of course!)


Edited by pgrzelak (09/06/2004 06:16)
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217933 - 09/06/2004 06:24 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Greetings!

Assuming you used the builder software to build the drive, the command that should have been run to generate the filesystem was: "mke2fs -m 0 -b 1024 -i 131072" according to Roger's manual build page. If you run the same command with a -n switch like this "mke2fs -n -m 0 -b 1024 -i 131072", it should theoretically show you exactly how the drive was built and where the superblock copies are without damaging anything. I am hoping someone who knows this (and is not just guessing and theorizing like I am) will confirm this.

After that, you should be able to take one of the other superblock copies that are displayed by the above command and run an "fsck -b <superblocknumber> -fay /dev/hda4" to use the alternative superblock.


Edited by pgrzelak (09/06/2004 06:38)
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217934 - 09/06/2004 07:58 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
will confirm this

Sounds fair to me. It certainly can't make anything worse (as long as that -n is included!).

_________________________
-- roger

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#217935 - 09/06/2004 09:21 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
genixia
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 08/02/2002
Posts: 3411
I'm sure that an alternative superblock has helped someone before and may be somewhere in the archives...

<Me goes to practice Search-Fu>
_________________________
Mk2a 60GB Blue. Serial 030102962 sig.mp3: File Format not Valid.

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#217936 - 09/06/2004 09:35 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: genixia]
genixia
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 08/02/2002
Posts: 3411
Yep. An alternative superblock is at 32768

Incidentally, even if _all_ the superblocks were corrupt, you could still attempt to reinitialise them without formatting the rest of the partition by giving the -S flag to mke2fs. I don't know what sequence of events could cause all the superblocks to corrupt without the data corrupting though.


Edited by genixia (09/06/2004 09:38)
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Mk2a 60GB Blue. Serial 030102962 sig.mp3: File Format not Valid.

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#217937 - 09/06/2004 10:32 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: Roger]
peter
carpal tunnel

Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
Sounds fair to me. It certainly can't make anything worse (as long as that -n is included!).
I've a nasty feeling that -n hadn't been invented in the (now very, very, very old) e2fsprogs release that car-players had installed.

Peter

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#217938 - 09/06/2004 10:37 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: peter]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
It should just error out with a bad parameter, though. Right?
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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#217939 - 09/06/2004 10:47 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: pgrzelak]
sundayjumper
journeyman

Registered: 19/06/2002
Posts: 72
Loc: West Berkshire
Hi,

Back again. This looks good, but can somebody translate into plain English please ? :-)

Do I just need to run Paul's "fsck -b <superblocknumber> -fay /dev/hda4" using the 32768 figure that genixia provided ?

Many thanks,

Steve.
_________________________
Mk2a 10+40Gb Darkstorm Neon Red Nakamichi CD45z, Genesis Five Channel, Genesis A16s, JL 8W6 x3

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#217940 - 09/06/2004 10:59 Re: Several problems all at once :-( [Re: sundayjumper]
pgrzelak
carpal tunnel

Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
Hahahaha. Sorry about that. We were just looking for a way to find out how to learn where the duplicate copies of the superblock were and what to use.

Yes. You should be able to run that command directly.

"fsck -b 32768 -fay /dev/hda4"
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs

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