I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04 (Alpha 6) using "update-manager -c -d", which went fine. After the upgrade completed, I was told to reboot the machine and that's what I did. After the reboot I entered my username / password at the login prompt, which then told me that my home directory did not exist! My "/home" is a ReiserFS-3.6 volume on LVM2. I rebooted into rescue mode and tried to mount "/home", which resulted in this error:
# mount /home
mount: Operation not supported
The corresponding line from "/etc/fstab" is "/dev/mapper/storage--toxikum-home /home reiserfs defaults,acl,user_xattr 0 2". I looked for error messages in "dmesg" and found this:
...
[ 391.173974] ReiserFS: dm-4: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
[ 391.173999] ReiserFS: dm-4: using ordered data mode
[ 391.178746] ReiserFS: dm-4: journal params: device dm-4, size 8192, journal first block 18, max trans len 1024, max batch 900, max commit age 30, max trans age 30
[ 391.179232] ReiserFS: dm-4: checking transaction log (dm-4)
[ 391.225417] ReiserFS: warning: is_tree_node: node level 26691 does not match to the expected one 1
[ 391.225425] ReiserFS: dm-4: warning: vs-5150: search_by_key: invalid format found in block 8211. Fsck?
[ 391.225434] ReiserFS: dm-4: warning: vs-13070: reiserfs_read_locked_inode: i/o failure occurred trying to find stat data of [1 2 0x0 SD]
[ 391.225443] ReiserFS: dm-4: Using r5 hash to sort names
[ 391.225452] ReiserFS: dm-4: warning: xattrs/ACLs enabled and couldn't find/create .reiserfs_priv. Failing mount.
...
Because of the hint to xattrs / ACLs I tried mounting "/home" without "acl,user_xattr" and even with "noacl,nouser_xattr", which did not help. The error message in "dmesg" stayed exactly the same.
Next I tried to run "reiserfsck" on "/dev/storage-toxikum/home" ("reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/storage-toxikum/home") which produced this output:
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reiserfsck --fix-fixable started at Sun Mar 16 15:37:41 2008
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Replaying journal..
Reiserfs journal '/dev/storage-toxikum/home' in blocks [18..8211]: 0 transactions replayed
Checking internal tree../ 1 (of 2)/ 1 (of 87)/ 1 (of 114)block 8211: The level of the node (26691) is not correct, (1) expected
the problem in the internal node occured (8211), whole subtree is skipped
finished
Comparing bitmaps..vpf-10630: The on-disk and the correct bitmaps differs. Will be fixed later.
Bad nodes were found, Semantic pass skipped
1 found corruptions can be fixed only when running with --rebuild-tree
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reiserfsck finished at Sun Mar 16 15:38:34 2008
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It now seemed clear that my volume somehow got fried, so i took a copy of "/dev/storage-toxikum/home" for reference (using "dd") and started "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree", which left me with a folder "lost+found" from which I could restore most of the data that wasn't up-to-date in my backup. I attached the lengthy output from "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/storage-toxikum/home".
All my other ReiserFS-volumes in the same LVM-VG (like "/usr", "/var" or "/tmp") were not damaged. Now of course it is possible that this is merely a coincidence and that it's actually my hard drive which is failing. However I find this unlikely since I never had trouble with this disk and it also works like a charm now (after I restored my backup). SMART also tells me that the drive is fine.
If you need any more information, I would be happy to help. As I said, I have an image of the failed volume so I can run all sorts of tests on it. By the way, I tried mounting the image using a loopback device on a Debian machine running kernel 2.6.24-1-686, which left me with the same error.
The same happened in my case. After upgrading from gusty to hardy alpha 6, everything worked fine. But after one reboot, my system could not be initialized, because fsck on /home failed. I had to make fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-tree
It worked fine, but second reboot forced me to rebuilt-tree once more. Now I cannot launch normal session, because fsck allways fails on home. I'm pretty sure that it is not hardware related problem.