When Biella came to me today with a Grub error 2 (disk not found), I really thought that the problem would be solved within a little bit, even though we couldn’t boot from USB (the verbose “Boot error”) and had no CD drive available. Joey Hess fortunately had a netboot setup, so we ended up with a shell before too long.
… but that was only the beginning of the fun. To make a long
story short, we’re now sitting and watching e2fsck
reporting “page after page after page” of error messages (quote
Micah), consisting mainly of error messages listing thousands
(literally) of block numbers claimed by multiple inodes on a single
line.
We have not figured out what actually happened, but it’s somewhere between a motherboard problem and filesystem corruption accumulating over several weeks (Biella said the machine has been acting flakey lately). We’ll consider sending the image to Theodore for analysis.
Reading this and seeing
her root partition go from working to something probably no longer
resembling a filesystem really settle the issue for me. Never ever
will I touch ext2 or ext3 again; XFS
forever!
