reboot cycle, no log messages

[Joel Rees]

In case someone searching for something finds this thread (or I find  
myself forgetting things I've done again) and the following  
information helps:

I ended up filing a bug, and in the process thought of checking a few  
more combinations. Checking those led me to discover I had /dev/sda 
(n) and /dev/sdb(n) reversed on the partitions/file systems that were  
actually causing complaints.  Specifically, it was not the LVM  
partitions giving me the problems, that was just where the messages  
were making it to the screen. It was me trying to mount /dev/sdb4  
instead of /dev/sda4 (or was it the other way around?) in /etc/ 
fstab . (who'da thunk? especiallly with the zero-length partition  
thing 8-p)

(I left the bug there because the error messages could be improved,  
but my problems are solved.)

On Jan 1, 2010, at 5:00 PM, Joel Rees wrote:

> Just before it reboots, it gives me messages about old ext3  
> partitions that have problems mounting.
>
> [...]
> This is what I captured with a digital camera when it cycled:
>
> --------------------------------
> /dev/mapper/fc7-7[various]: clean [long list of partitions from the  
> old system]
> /dev/mapper/fc7-7varwww: clean, 644/516896 files, 27268/516896 blocks
>                                                                        
>    [failed]
>
> *** An error occured during the file system check,
> *** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
> *** when you leave the shell.
> *** Warning -- SELinux is active
> *** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
> *** Run 'setenforce 1' to reenable.
> sulogin: error while loading shared libraries: libfreebl3.so:  
> cannot open shared
>  object file: No such file or directory
> Unmounting file system
> Automatic reboot in progress.
> -------------------------------
> [...]
>
> Setting the passno entry in /etc/fstab to 0 or commenting out the  
> entry just pushes the error message back. When a large partition  
> at /dev/sdb4, which I use for backup, is the final partition  
> checked in /etc/fstab, it gives me
>
> ------------------------------
> fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short  
> read while trying to open /dev/sdb4
> Could this be a zero-length partition?
> ------------------------------
>
> and then the messages about libfreebl3.so and the automatic reboot.
>
> yum provides libfreebl3.so tells me that nss-softokn-freebl is  
> installed. Trying an erase to re-install it tells me that most of  
> the OS and most of the apps seem to be dependent on it, one way or  
> another. Hmm.
>
> This looks like I need to file a bug or two. Anyone know what's  
> happening here?
>
> Joel Rees
>