SDHC /home not properly umounted at shutdown on Eee PC

[Dan Kortschak]

Binary package hint: sysvinit

Eee PC with hardy install does not properly umount all volumes at shutdown. On reboot /dev/sdb1 (/home - a SDHC card mounted by UUID at boot) nearly always (>90% of time) requires fsck, reporting "/dev/sdb1 not cleanly unmounted..."

This problem has been noted with Mandriva on the Eee as seen at <http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=251599>. The fix as described at that page is not applicable to the hardy initscripts, but placing the `sync; sync; sync; sleep 3' in rc.localstop does not fix problem.

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy

$ dpkg -l initscripts
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-f/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/t-aWait/T-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
ii initscripts 2.86.ds1-14.1u Scripts for initializing and shutting down t

[Dan Kortschak (dan-kortschak)]

syncing volumes as described above immediately before the final halt command in /etc/init.d/halt (shown below) does not fix the problem.

 log_action_msg "Will now halt"
 sleep 1

>>>

 halt -d -f -i $poweroff $hddown
}

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Do you still have this hardware and this problem? Thank you for telling us!

[Dan Kortschak (dan-kortschak)]

Yes, I still have that hardware. Yes, the problem is still exhibited. The current install is 10.04 and will probably stay that for the forseeable life of the current universe, so I doubt a fix will be forthcoming.

Five years is a pretty slow turn around.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This will definitely not be fixed for 10.04, which is no longer a supported desktop release.

Chances are the unclean shutdown is caused by some rogue process on your system - perhaps one not belonging to the official Ubuntu OS - holding files open on the /home partition at shutdown time. In later releases, we are working to improve the debuggability of such errors so that users will be able to identify the programs responsible, but that won't be of any use to you in 10.04.

If you are willing to test with a later release we can help investigate if the problem is still present and what's causing it. Otherwise, this bug report should probably be closed as 'wontfix'.

[Dan Kortschak (dan-kortschak)]

Yes, if you leave something for long enough eventually it becomes unimportant.

If this had been properly triaged and assigned - i.e. before five years after the initial submission - then questions aimed at identifying the cause of the problem might have been possible to follow up.

No. Chances are not that some process not belonging to the official Ubuntu OS is holding open a file on the device. This behaviour was apparent out of the box. To make an uniformed claim about a cause without having made any effort at requesting information about installed software is laughable.

I rarely use that hardware anymore, and it will not be upgraded beyond 10.04 so it is unlikely (p=0) that this bug will be fixed. Whether the bug in the process will be fixed is aother matter - I'm not confident.