yaboot : filesystem corruption

[gringo]

Hey all,

its been a while but in the last few days i tried to get my alubook up to date, just to play with a few things there.
Yesterday morning when i booted it up again ( it worked perfectly fine the days before) i was presented by yaboot with a screen saying more or less "filesystem unknown or corrupted". Worth to mention that yes, i updated yaboot the day before ( and re-run ybin) and e2fsprogs(-libs) and added static-libs as requested.
After using an old livecd from fedora ( gentoos didnt work for me) i checked every single file system on the disk and it all looked fine. I even re-emerged yaboot and deps again just to check if maybe some file there was corrupted but no joy.

So, any clues ? I really have no idea what could be wrong.

TIA

[JoseJX]

Stable or unstable yaboot? What kind of filesystem for the root partition? When is it happening in the boot sequence?
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[gringo]

- im on unstable, latest yaboot in the tree
- root is on ext4, /boot is ext2
- it doesnt get to load the system, if i hit enter in yaboot to load the kernel it says literally"(OF route to the /boot partition): Unknown partition or corrupted filesystem)

Macos boots, i supposed the problem was that the bootstrap partition was corrupted so that i tried to rewrite the hole bootstrap partition with mkboot, which succeded without errors but i get the same message when i try to boot afterwards.

TIA !

[neopablo2000]

Hi gringo! did you solve this problem? same here... Just upgraded yaboot, and after that, no matter what i try (booting livecd, reinstalling yaboot, rechecking yaboot.conf, etc) i can get it to boot. Same message: Unknown or corrupt filesystem. Thank you!!

[khayyam]

neopablo2000 et al ...

my pismo died some six months back and so I'm unable to test this at all, however, I think the issue here is with newer yaboot versions (compiled against newer e2fsprogs) and whats currently installed in NVRAM. In simple terms: a mismatch between ex2fs on disk and what the NVRAM expects that filesystem to be like.

Unfortuanately I can't think of a way to fix it as you can't boot to update the NVRAM and it seems the version of yaboot on the boot disk is the version of built against the old e2fsprogs.

Again, I'm speculating on the cause here, but it does seem to fit with current changes. Perhaps JoseJX can suggest a solution or provide a link to a livecd with yaboot-1.3.17-r2.

best ... khay

[neopablo2000]

thank you very much for the answer! But a couple of minutes ago, my problem got solved. How? Well, kind of weird.. I kept going into booting livecd (liveusb in fact), and trying and trying.. And only God knows why, i checked my partitions with mac-fdisk, and oohhh, surprise! My partition table had changed... to be more graphic, it was:

/dev/hda1 Apple_partition_map
/dev/hda2 Apple_Bootstrap
/dev/hda3 swap
/dev/hda4 root
/dev/hda5 Apple_free
/dev/hda6 Apple_HFS (aqui tengo Mac os X)

The only thing i did was to update my world with the classic emerge -uDN world, wich updated yaboot. After that, the problem began... The weird thing is that in one of those many reboots with liveusb, i checked my partitions with mac-fdisk and it was as explained before. I never did any change, nor saved anything with the command w inside mac-fdisk, just printed partition table, watched, and quitted (q).
But a while ago, keeping trying to solve this problem, rechecked my partition scheme, and it changed to:

/dev/hda1 Apple_partition_map
/dev/hda2 Apple_Bootstrap
/dev/hda3 Apple_Free
/dev/hda4 swap
/dev/hda5 root
/dev/hda6 Apple_HFS

Why in heaven the free apple partition changed its position in the partition table, is a mystery to me... what i know for sure is that i run yabootconfig, i detected the new scheme, installed, and now i booted succesfully. Perhaps it can help ohters to see if the problem is the same. It is just what happened to me!, Sorry my english, not english-speaker! Again, thanks for the answer, and I`ll keep in touch, just in case!

[gringo]

thanks for your answers guys !

[neopablo2000]

Back here, because my problem is far from solved. After that successful boot (sorry my english, not english-speaker), y continued with what i was doing, it is, trying to put xfce to work. I needed to upgrade udev, wich didn´t compile, complaining about a couple of options in kernel not being set, and a couple, that i should unset. I did it, recompiled my kernel, put it in /boot, made the needed changes, and after reboot.... damn... "unknown or corrupt filesyste". Rebooted with liveusb, rechecked my partitions scheme, and it didn`t change. So, i downgraded yaboot (from r2 to r1), same result... So here Im, stucked again... trying to find out what`s wrong here... before restarting my system from liveusb, i made a fsck to /dev/hda5, just in case... clean... everything is where its supposed to be... what drives me crazy is: why it booted last time? the change in the partition scheme was casualty?... there is some kind of spell over this notebook....? muuuahahahahahaha!!!... It will continue...

P.D.: Gringo, i know you speak spanish, could you please tell me what the heck is TIA??? hahahaha!

P.D.2: Correct me if im wrong: does it mean Thanks In Advance? Just learning english, hahahaha!

[khayyam]

neopablo2000, gringo, et al ...

I think sys-fs/e2fsprogs is probably the issue here ... note that its added as a dependency, and the yaboot-stubfuncs.patch (for recent e2fsprogs) was added to sys-boot/yaboot-1.3.17-r2. Again, I sadly nolonger have a powerpc machine at hand and so I've no way to test this hypothesis, but if you downgrade yaboot I imagine that e2fsprogs might also need downgraded.

[neopablo2000]

Hi! I reached the same conclusion about e2fsprogs, but instead, i`m reemerging yaboot together with all its dependencies with emerge -eav yaboot. If successfull, I`ll post it, if not, I`ll downgrade e2fsprogs to see results. It took me to this package because the error message is kinda clear: unknown or corrupt filesystem. keeping in touch!!

[neopablo2000]

Hi! Well, my problem got solved in this way: having probed that emerge -eav yaboot didn`t solve the problem, y choose to downgrade e2fsprogs by masking version 1.43.4 and 1.43.3, so i got e2fsprogs-1.42.1. Also downgraded yaboot from version 1.3.17-r2 to 1.3.17-r1. This worked, and now i can boot normally. After downgrading e2fsprogs, trying to downgrade yaboot got me a new kind of error, complaining about a library not being where it was supposed to be, wich i solved reemerging e2fsprogs with static-libs USE. After that, yaboot compiled fine, and system booted normally. Sooooo, in resume, what i did:

1- masked versions 1.43.4 and 1.43.3 of e2fsprogs in /etc/portage/packages.mask

2- emerged e2fsprogs-1.43.1 with "statics-libs" USE

3- masked version 1.3.17-r2 of yaboot

4- emerged yaboot-1.3.17-r1

5- Just in case, reinstalled yaboot with yabootconfig, and that´s it, i can boot normally

Hope this can help you, gringo! You are the owner of this post . I`ll check to see if you did solve this during the day.

[gringo]

had some access to it and i can confirm that downgrading to stable e2fsprogs(-libs) both with static-libs USE enabled works here for me.
downgrading to *any* version of yaboot in the tree was even impossible with lots of "indefined-reference" errors, which i suppose means there is nothing worng with yaboot per se as yaboot is still the latest ~arch one.

Will try to track down which exact version is the latest one that works for me and/or if it might be related to the static-libs USE.
According to my emerge.log i jumped from 1.42_pre0702 ( which isnt in the tree anymore) to 1.42.4 which makes it easy to trackdown.

EDIT 1 : didnt see your post neopablo, gracias !
EDIT 2: @neopablo: yes, TIA means thanks in advance as far as i know.

cheers

[Ato]

Hi folks,

I am a very happy Grub2 user since I turned away from the dreaded yaboot. Please see the last message in this thread https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-809732.html.

Cheers,
T.

[neopablo2000]

Pretty interesting post about Grub2! For me, now yaboot is working fine, and like one of the first phrases i read while getting in Linux world: If it`s not broken, don`t fix it . Perhaps when Grub2 gets more documented and stable, I`ll give it a try. Gringo, I think the problem here is the static-libs USE flag. And nothing else. . if i wasn`t dealing with getting Xorg to work on my ppc, I would make tests to see if I`m correct. Perhaps after I solve that, I will. Thank you!!

[gringo]

umm, sorry to bring this back again but the same story just happened.
I went to upgrade this powerbook, removed the masks i had for yaboot and e2fsprogs(-libs) and upgraded everything.
After updating the kernel and rebooting i get the same error mesagge, ie. corrupted filesystem.
static-libs clearly isnt the problem, at least in this system.

One thing i have realized this time is that ybin complained about /dev/nvram not being accessible and indeed CONFIG_NVRAM is not enabled in the kernel.
Will see if this is the problem and will downgrade again otherwise.

Im wondering though : am i the only one hitting this problem or is this a general issue ? Because if it is the later i think we should figure out what versions are broken and mask them for ppc.
Is anyone here running latest yaboot and latest e2fsprogs(-libs) on ppc32 booting with yaboot without problems ?

EDIT : downgrading yaboot wasnt necessary,i only downgraded e2fsprogs(-libs) to currtent stable (1.42) and that did the trick.

thanks !

[wizard]

Gringo: I am. And I ran into troubles while installing from 20130908 ISO. Your hint about downgrading to 1.42 helped, but I had to abandon yabootconfig outside of chroot and use ybin in chroot. I wonder if this bug ihas been already reported.
Bye the way, thanks for hint

[gringo]

[mischa79]

I'm having the same problem.

Powerbook G4 alu 12", ext4 root partition on hda5 and ext2 separate /boot partition on hda6 (I created that after having the same problem booting from the ext4 partition, but the problem remained).

Now I know it's a bug. I'm very new to gentoo (used debian before), so I'd prefer not to downgrade packages, use masks or so... has the bug already been filed? Any news?

Or, should I try grub2? Any suggestions?

TIA

[gringo]

[mischa79]

Thank you so much Gringo.
I masked versions >1.42 of e2fsprogs (my version was in fact 1.42.7) and that solved the problem.

I think the bug should be filed anyway. Unfortunately, I don't have enough knowledge to file it myself.

Cheers!

[gringo]

[cartman4000]

boot a live cd of something (does not matter) mount all your partitions, and edit /etc/yaboot.conf

you have to say

[alsotoes]

Hi guys I have the exact same problem, but now the versions of e2fsprogs can't be downgraded

[alsotoes]

No worries, I just change the boot partition to XFS.
thanks anyway.
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[blackjok3r]

Hey guys. I have this same problem as I have stated in other threads. I have just started recompiling my kernel with xfs support in to make my boot partition xfs. I will update here if this is indeed the problem.

EDIT:
OK. This is defiantly a fix. I have successfully booted my kernel in yaboot by manually typing the path to the /boot xfs partition. This does not however result in a booting system, I get a kernel panic stating something to the effect of "supply a correct root=" and it cannot find my root partition. At least thats what I think its doing as it lists a whole bunch of ram disks. I don't know why and being a newb I am going to start again. This time doing the following.

*The guide needs to be updated. *
Make your root partition XFS, do not create a separate /boot partition.
You need to emerge --ask sys-boot/yaboot-static not yaboot.

I am now going to start all over again for the 4th time and should finally get a booting gentoo system. What a process this has been indeed lol.

EDIT2:
It boots. Now I'm not sure if it was changing the root or boot partition to xfs or adding the "partition=5" to the yaboot.conf.
However you do definatly need to install yaboot-static not yaboot in installation. The yaboot package is broken.
Also I don't know how yaboot is mean't to work out what the /boot partition is so I didn't use one and my system is booting fine. I am so happy right now. I just hope my use flags and kernel drivers are right and I can get openbox installed.