I have a new laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150) on which I've been trying to
get Linux stabilized. The ATI Radeon Mobility M9 is slightly
problematic, so it's been crashing a lot while I'm in X. I've been
running XFS with just one big filesystem on it, with 2.4.21 & recent
2.4.21-all patch applied, on top of RedHat 9. A couple of times now,
the thing has gone down hard requiring a power cycle (no sync possible),
only to find my /etc/fstab is full of nulls on reboot. Strangely,
that's the only file that's been getting "eaten" by the null-file thing.
The thing that is really confusing me is: why the heck is fstab being
eaten and why only fstab? "lsof" on this machine right this moment does
not show that fstab is open. Has anyone else had this problem with
RedHat9? Does anyone have any other thoughts on why this would be
happening?
Unfortunately (fortunately?) it hasn't happened every time it's crashed,
so I've not bothered with booting from the LNX-BBC "rescue" CD I made to
do an xfs_check against the filesystem before it gets mounted and
autorepaired, so I don't know if the fstab is already trashed at the
time of the crash, or if the auto-repair is somehow mangling it.
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