A breakthrough, sort of.

[_quinn]

So I've been leaving my monitor on and at VT1 when I leave Az-chan alone at home to see if I could get some error messages before she committed suicide. I got one today, a kernel panic. Unfortunately, the top half had scrolled off the top of the screen, but the call tree was kind of scary: from cstar_do_call/sys_write/vfs_write through some timer

Comments

[anonymous]

Despite what I told Garran last night, Az-chan's going to be missing for a while. Looks like whatever's been causing the kernel to suicide interacted with the disk driver or the filesystem and corrupted /'s superblock. I neglected to check if both halves of the mirror were corrupted (I would expect so), and I'm going to try a few different bootable CDs tonight to see if I can find one with a recent-enough kernel and a copy of e2fsck in case the superblock backups escaped unscathed. If I can't get one of the CDs I burned today to work, and I remember to bring my CD-R spindle into work, I might spend evenings until the weekend trying different ones. Then I'll reinstall over the weekend, failing all else. *sigh* And on Sunday night, I was thinking, "when I bring Az-chan up tommorow, I should take the monthly backup snapshot, since it hasn't happened yet." (Last month's backup and yesterday's daily incremental backup are on a partition that shouldn't have been mounted when the root FS bought it, so I should be able to get them back. We'll have to see how much use they're actually going to be, and installing a 'clean' copy of Debian probably has its own advantages. The tricky bit is going to be remembering all the magic scripts...)