HDA won't boot. Stuck at entering non-interactive startup

[AndyNJ]

My HDA seems to be a complete mess. I can't get the system to start anymore, it hangs on "entering non-interactive startup."

What's worse is that this particular snag is new and preventing me from even posting about the initial problem that I wanted to post about. This is my 3rd or 4th Amahi installation and each time, after a few weeks, at some point when I do a restart, the system starts to take forever to start up and then when it does, I can only log in as root. I can't actually get into my user account. And MySQL will not start up so I can't access my files (everything is in the pool) and I keep getting errors that my filesystem is out of storage space (I'm assuming because greyhole can't run).

What seems to happen (on that first troubled restart) is that a drive won't initialize right or something on start up and then I get disk errors that need to be taken care of. I run through fsck before booting and fix all the problems. Then I'm screwed.

Like I mentioned, this keeps happening. Does anyone have any ideas what I can do to fix all of these issues? If there isn't a way to prevent this from happening again, I can't bring myself to do yet another re-installation. I'm going to have to switch to something else.

I'm willing to go down the route of one of my drives being on its way out, but I feel as though that shouldn't be causing me from being able to boot altogether and then, when I can boot, not being able to start MySQL. Additionally, after the drive errors are remedied, the system has no problem initializing that drive before it gets stuck at "entering non-interactive startup."

I'm willing to post any info I can to help, but I'm not sure what I can get to since the system won't boot.

[AndyNJ]

I'll quickly add that I'm running Amahi 6.

[AndyNJ]

A little more info...

I restarted again and instead of booting into the default kernel, selected 2.6.35.6-45. Doing this gets me past the "entering non-interactive startup" step, but then it takes a little while to go past "starting ntpd." It does get past that, but then it has trouble once it gets to greyhole. It says it can't write to the disk because it's full (I can assure you that no disk or partition is full) yet then gives the okay that it started. After that, I get a message that it can't connect to MySQL server through socket. Now the screen is completely blank and it doesn't look like it's doing anything, but the hard drive light keeps flashing.

The thing that I don't get is that this happens without me messing with anything or changing anything.

EDIT: I missed it before, but it gave a simple and quick "failed" on "starting mysqld"

[AndyNJ]

On another attempt with 2.6.35.6-45, I got to the login screen, but there's a message saying the "configuration defaults for GNOME power manager have not been installed correctly."

At this point, I'm back to what I mentioned in the first post where I can't get into my user account. The UI just freezes up when I click on it. If I login as root, I can't manually start MySQL.

[radioz]

Are you having hard-drive or memory problems?

You might want to check error logs to see if there is some type of hardware issue first.

Post anything you find.

[AndyNJ]

It COULD be a hard drive issue, I guess, but it just seems so weird that it just won't even boot after all this happens. The only thing I can think is that there is a drive problem which causes filesystem issues and then the fsck ends up corrupting something. I have no idea really.

I couldn't wait anymore, I had to do something so I'm doing yet another reinstall. This time though, I'm going to add my system partition to CrashPlan so I can more easily recover if this happens again. I'm also going to remove a few drives that are older and may be suspects.

We'll see, but this is ungodly frustrating.

At least I've done this so many times that I've got it down to a science! haha

[cpg]

I can see how it may be frustrating.

Check the output of

Code: Select all

dmesg | tail -200

once you *can* boot and experiencing issue .. of course.

it does seem like hardware related. amahi has a reputation of reliability and we look at this from the software/configuration point of view, it seems unlikely. it *could* be drivers related to fedora and your hardware. a quick search may help.

memory crashes tend to be very very random. this looks more like drive issues. You can try palimpest (or something) as a tool to check the SMART diagnostics from your drives. Or ... put it/them in another system and check ...?

[AndyNJ]

I'm back up and running now. I started checking the SMART data for all the drives and I think I've identified the suspect. It's a bit of an older drive and it's got a bunch of errors. I've got a Greyhole --going running on it now and once it's done I'll pop it out and run some tests on it and then hope for the best.

Luckily, it's a small drive, so I'm not losing much. We'll see!