F8 freezes during boot - "getpwnam failed for roota"

[magmagal]

Hi all,

I'm running F8 dual-boot with XP on a Dell Inspiron 6000. Yesterday, Fedora ran fine all day - no sign of problems. Last night I switched over to the Win side for a few hours, and then shut the computer down for the night. This morning, I tried to boot into Fedora, and it hung on "Enabling local filesystem quotas". Left it for an hour or so, nothing happened. Tried rebooting into both available kernels several times, same thing. Windows still boots fine.

I booted into text mode and found an error "getpwnam failed for roota" at "Enabling local filesystem quotas". I can't find any information on this problem and 'roota' seems very strange to me. Any ideas??

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[Agares]

This is weird. If I'm correct getpwnam is unable to retrieve the password entry for a user named roota. Maybe you should try using the Linux rescue to resolve the issue. It would make sense to me that if there is no roota then of course it wouldn't be able to retrieve the information.

[magmagal]

Assuming the problem is that the system can't find a user roota (leaving aside the question of why this happened), it seems I have two options:

1. Add a user roota - I can't seem to do this with Linux rescue the usual way, using useradd
2. Modify something to stop the system looking for roota upon startup. I have no idea how to approach this one.

Any further suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[magmagal]

Manually adding a line to /etc/passwd with a user roota avoids the "getpwnam failed for roota" message, but the system still freezes at the same point during startup, just after displaying "Enalbing local filesystem quotas".

[Agares]

I guess you could try running fsck on that hard disk or partition (whichever you use). I have had problems with my file system getting screwed up before when running a dual boot configuration. It would hang at points like that where it involved the file system of course. This might of course be a coincidence.

[magmagal]

I tried running fsck. I'm not sure that I'm running it correctly. I booted off the rescue CD and skipped the mount to go to a command line. Then I tried:

fsck -c /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

and got "No such file or directory". Same with /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01. Am I supposed to mount the filesystem before running fsck on logical volumes? Or does this indicate something wrong? Thanks in advance for your response.

I've been running the dual-boot on this machine for over two years with no problems - I don't understand why it started misbehaving all of a sudden!!

[Agares]

Well you don't run fsck on a mounted filesystem. Also you need to do fsck -p /dev/<your disk & partition> for example. Hope this helps.

[magmagal]

Booting off the rescue CD, skipping the mount, and running fsck -p /dev/sda gives

fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
WARNING: couldn't open /etc/fstab: No such file or directory
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
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>

Also, in digging around, I found in /var/log/messages that the following message repeated every 30 minutes or so the day before the problem started:

May 4 08:29:14 localhost smartd[2591]: Device: /dev/sda, 1 currently unreadable (pending) sectors.

Running badblocks -v -v /dev/sda returns

Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found.

Any suggestions on what is happening and/or what to try next?

[magmagal]

A few more pieces of information.

1. Digging back through old /var/log/messages files, I see that the bad sector message was appearing for over one month. Running a selftest with smartctl (smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda) gives the following:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA
#1 Extended offline Completed without error 0% 7 -

2. If I change the entry for root in /etc/passwd to roota (after booting into the system with the rescue CD), I then get a message of "getpwnam failed for root" during bootup at the same point, and the same freeze.

3. Also, looking at lastlog shows only one entry. The full text of lastlog is below:

Username Port From Latest
root **Never logged in**

This strikes me as strange since I have certainly logged in as root and I usually login with another account on this machine (e.g., magmagal, which I still see a line for in the /etc/passwd file).

Is is possible that some file went corrupt? That I got hacked or got a virus somehow?? Any thought or suggestion would be appreciated.

[dishawjp]

Magmagal,

As a thought, have you checked your /etc/shadow file for an entry for roota? That has more or less replaced the /etc/passwd file for authentication and is the file that holds the encrypted password. Perhaps you can comment out the "roota" line in both files and see what happens.

A simple way of forcing a fsck to a booting system is to create an empty file on the root directory named "forcefsck"

To do this, boot with the rescue CD, chroot to the filesystem and issue the command:

touch /forcefsck

Then reboot. This forces a fsck before the filesystem is mounted.

Just some random things to try...

HTH,

Jim Dishaw

[magmagal]

Thank you for the suggestions. There is no entry for "roota" in either /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow - this is what is so strange. I don't understand where "roota" comes from, since this is not and never was an account on this system, to my knowledge or according to the files in /etc.

I ran forcefsck as you suggested and rebooted. The following appeared during the boot:

Setting up Logical Volume Management
<<|/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00|--------------------------------xx%

Then, at around 70%, I got

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY (i.e., without -a or -p option) [FAILED]

Does this give any specific indication of the problem? Any suggestions on what to try next? Thanks again for any comments.

[magmagal]

Well, I still have no idea what caused the problem, despite spending lots of time trying to figure it out, but I solved it. Running fsck manually and answering yes to all prompted changes solved whatever was wrong.

Here's what I did:

1. Boot from Rescue CD
2. Answer no to prompt about mounting the filesystem ('Skip')
3. At the command line, enter the following sequence of commands:
> lvm pvscan
> lvm vgscan
> lvm lvscan
> lvm -lvchange -ay /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 (using information from previous commands)

4. Run fsck and answer 'y' to all prompts:
> fsck /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

After fsck finished I rebooted and the system appears to be completely back to normal. There were lots of changes made by fsck, but I did not document them.

[dishawjp]

Magmagal,

Great Job!

I'm not familiar enough with the logical volume and volume group commands to have helped you with those; guess I've just been lucky enough to never have had a problem with them.

Congratulations on a successful troubleshoot and system repair.

Feels good doesn't it?

Jim