LiveCD(Flight 6) Hangs because of broken harddrive(s)

[lucasvo]

The Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6 Live CD (ppc) hangs when it tries to automount a broken harddrive. I see the common i/o errors. I think in that case there should be a timeout and automount should be killed and booting should proceed.

[Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen)]

Given that casper doesn't try to automount anything, I doubt your analysis is correct. More likely, this is evms trying to determine the partition layout and failing to do so and never timing out.

[Kevin Corry (kevcorry)]

EVMS uses fairly simple I/O (read(2) and write(2), with O_DIRECT turned on) to read and write metadata to disk from user-space. Are you saying that because your harddrive is broken, that the read() call never returns? I would expect that the kernel would be the one to eventually time-out and return an I/O error in this type of situation.

Can you be more specific about the "hang" that you're experiencing? Does the system lock up, or just become unresponsive? Can you get any debug info? Kernel log? Is it possible to run EVMS with "debug" logging level from the LiveCD?

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

I encounterd the same problem with an machine w/ a broken disk.

The machine seems to hang when EVMS starts loading. But it did continue, but very very slowly. There where numerous I/O errors printed on the screen.

Some posible solutions:
* Let EVMS detecting stop after the first I/O error
* a no-evms or do-not-probe-disks option at the bootloader
* detect broken disks using smartmontools and blacklist them

This was using the 6.06.1 LiveCD for x86 on a HP Compaq notebook. The disk contained 1 NTFS partition.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

evms is no longer included by default, so this shouldn't occur again -- however it may occur if you install evms deliberately thus wont fix rather than fixed