Linux boot/shutdown problems suddenly appeared

[strugglingpen]

Hi.

I'm running RedHat 6.2 on an intel PIII 600, using LILO dual boot with Windows. I have been running this install of linux stably for two years or more. In the last week or so, I have been getting failure messages at boot and shutdown. The system still basically works, but not everything.

Problems include:

- can no longer see Windows disk partition from linux

- numerous daemons fail to be killed appropriately on shutdown, though most start successfully on startup

- it no longer tries to start lpd on startup, and I am therefore unable to print

- fsck runs on every startup, because filesystems are apparently not unmounted cleanly on shutdown

I can think of two things that were outside of my normal usage patterns that might be connected in some way to these problems.

1) in the week or so before I noticed this problem I was installing a few new things...nothing major, just little toy and game programs. Perhaps something here touched files it should not have. If this seems likely to experts out there, what should I look for?

2) I'm in part of the continent that experienced the great power outtage last week. Could have been a power surge that didn't agree with my machine. I'm not sure if I think this is likely, since the problem seems to be software-related, not hardware-related, but it could be.

So...what do people think?

Thanks!

Scott 8)

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Have you done a surface scan on your hdd?

What exactly do the daemons say when they don't die properly?

1) sounds weird, I've never heard of any app that would cause all this. Granted, I haven't heard of everything, but it's unlikely. Did you have to install these apps as root?

2) could cause filesystem corruption as ext2 is not journaled - I guess that's what 6.2 uses. But does fsck report anything?

Have you checked /var/log/messages to see what's going on?

cat /proc/filesystems tell which fs's are supported by kernel, but I don't think some of them would just disappear.