viswswrn@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (V. Visweswaran) (12/02/90)
I look after a MIPS RC2030 at our lab. Maybe someone can help me with something really strange that seems to have happened to the machine. I needed to stop the BSD line printer daemon for a reason, and therefore I issued a 'kill -9' command to do this. This seemed to work fine. But immediately, the system really went crazy. When I issued a 'ps -ef' command, it gave an error message saying something like ps : ftw() failed - no such file or directory. A number of the system commands seemed to fail. For example, issuing "who" gave an answer of ".". I could not see any solution to this, so I did a couple of sync's and brought the system down with an "init 0". Then, I tried to bring the machine back up, but when it reached the stage where it needed to fsck the file systems, it failed. We have the root and the '/usr' filesystems on a single 172Mb disk, with '/usr' on partition 2. When I checked the corresponding entry for /dev/usr, I found something similar to the following : -r-xr-xr-x 1 root 24368 July 25, 1989 usr For some reason, the system says that this file is no longer a block special device. As a result, I can no longer mount '/usr' on the system. The root system can be mounted, and so can another file system called '/usr1' that corresponds to a different disk. The system still gives an error message to the "ps" command and to some other commands like 'who'. Also, when I do an fsck.ffs on the root file system, it does not work, while it works for the '/usr1' file system. I am really stumped about what to do. Perhaps someone knows what is happening. Thanks in advance. -- V. Visweswaran (vishy) Mail: viswswrn@phoenix.princeton.edu vishy@catinhat.princeton.edu Dept. of Chemical Engineering Princeton University