10.04 LiveCD (USB-ified with usb-creator) decided to use an existing HDD partition for swap.

[Dan Shoutis]

I'm not entirely sure where the culprit is... but the behaviour is entirely unacceptable.

Background: Fixing a RAID5 system that has had a disk go bad/out of sync. It wasn't booting, there was some filesystem corruption.

All five drives were partitioned into two partitions, and RAID set up over both: md0 = /dev/sd?1 and md1 = /dev/sd?2
(All partitions were marked linux-raid-autodetect in the partition table type field)

Made a bootable USB (10.04 Desktop edition, usb-creator) so I could swap out the CD drive for a big HDD and dump a quick backup onto it. (System has only 6 SATA ports and 5 were taken by the array).

Booted. Launched terminal. Installed mdadm via aptitude. Fired up Firefox for reference.

Tried to assemble the array. (mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sd?2)

Got "device or resource is busy" error on /dev/sde2 from mdadm.

Ran "fuser" to see what was using it. Turns out it was the kernel, for swap.

!!! RAGE !!!

((Then swapoff -a and frantic recovery attempts since one drive was already bad. :( We'll see if I get an okay backup off this or not.))

I have NO idea why linux decided to do this. Will update with more info as I get it.

Random additional thoughts:
 - the contents of the raid: md0 = boot; md1 = LVM group with root (XFS) and swap volumes.
 - maybe a UUID collision? once I'm done dumping files I'll look at that sort of thing.
 - It was rather difficult to avoid profanity in typing up this bug report.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: linux-image-2.6.32-23-generic 2.6.32-23.37
Regression: No
Reproducible: No
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-23.37-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-23-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
AlsaVersion: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.21.
Architecture: amd64
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: dan 1990 F.... pulseaudio
 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: dan 1990 F...m pulseaudio
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xfc220000 irq 17'
   Mixer name : 'Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)'
   Components : 'HDA:14f15051,17aa2100,00100000 HDA:14f12c06,17aa2122,00100000'
   Controls : 14
   Simple ctrls : 7
Card29.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:29 'ThinkPadEC'/'ThinkPad Console Audio Control at EC reg 0x30, fw 7VHT12WW-1.01'
   Mixer name : 'ThinkPad EC 7VHT12WW-1.01'
   Components : ''
   Controls : 1
   Simple ctrls : 1
Card29.Amixer.values:
 Simple mixer control 'Console',0
   Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum
   Playback channels: Mono
   Mono: Playback [on]
Date: Sun Jul 18 15:43:01 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
Frequency: This has only happened once.
HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=2e67e80f-9fe0-4bb3-93fc-7b8a545e747d
MachineType: LENOVO 2081CTO
PccardctlIdent:
 Socket 0:
   no product info available
PccardctlStatus:
 Socket 0:
   no card
ProcCmdLine: root=UUID=6f5a17ec-eb58-42ce-b69b-f99e8c5b7473 ro quiet splash crashkernel=384M-2G:64M,2G-:128M
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
RelatedPackageVersions: linux-firmware 1.34.1
SourcePackage: linux
WpaSupplicantLog:

dmi.bios.date: 04/22/2009
dmi.bios.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.bios.version: 6FET66WW (2.16 )
dmi.board.name: 2081CTO
dmi.board.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.board.version: Not Available
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: No Asset Information
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.chassis.version: Not Available
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnLENOVO:bvr6FET66WW(2.16):bd04/22/2009:svnLENOVO:pn2081CTO:pvrThinkPadT500:rvnLENOVO:rn2081CTO:rvrNotAvailable:cvnLENOVO:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
dmi.product.name: 2081CTO
dmi.product.version: ThinkPad T500
dmi.sys.vendor: LENOVO

[Dan Shoutis (dan-shoutis)]

N.b: the system I submitted the bug from is NOT the one that had the corruption/swap issue -- that one is churning away with what I hope is a semi-intact backup.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Dan,

If you could also please test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

    [This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Dan Shoutis (dan-shoutis)]

Hi Jeremy,

I might need a bit of hand-holding to get the kernel installed since the issue is with a boot-CD environment that's been moved onto a USB drive.

I'm thinking of chrooting into it from another system and using normal apt as per instructions above, then just overwriting the ubuntu kernel with a copy of the upstream one (since as far as I know there's no GRUB menu for picking kernels when I boot from the USB).

Would that, dirty hack as it may be, work well enough? Would I need to overwrite the initrd too?

Note: I have to finish doing backups (using photorec over 1TB array is a *slow* process), troubleshoot the drive that died, rebuild+reinstall, and get the machine back to its owner by Sunday, and I'm travelling today and tomorrow -- so the window of time for doing experiments is extremely limited. What sort of other information should I grab? (e.g. I could try and tar up /sys, /etc, /var/log, etc... there's not much privileged info on this machine so I can be verbose, but I want to make sure I get the useful stuff.)

[Dan Shoutis (dan-shoutis)]

/proc/swaps:

Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/ramzswap0 partition 252328 28 100
/dev/sdc2 partition 2097144 0 -1
/dev/sdd2 partition 2097144 0 -2

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu development release http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Dan Shoutis (dan-shoutis)]

IMO, it would be good for someone at least to look at the logs and dumps I've put here before closing this.

It's going to be impossible for me to reproduce this, but it was *definitely* a system-eater.

1TB of really important data (the system was used for videography) gone. :(

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]