/home randomly fails

jmoschetti45 · 11-20-2009, 01:56 PM

Not sure where to check logs for this, but here's what's happening.

It'll boot up fine, but at random after a few days /home becomes unusable.

ls brings up an i/o error.
I try to unmount it, but it's busy, so I throw -fl in, and it will.

I try to remount it on /testing to see if that helps any, and it mounts, but still isn't usable again (same i/o error). I have to use -fl to unmount it again.

Reboot fixes this issue.

Suggestions?

ehawk · 11-20-2009, 02:22 PM

While this won't fix whatever is causing the problem, it might allow you to unmount and remount without rebooting:

"lazy unmount"

http://jehiah.cz/archive/lazy-unmount

http://aplawrence.com/Linux/lazy-unmount.html

jmoschetti45 · 11-20-2009, 03:25 PM

That's what I've been doing. -fl = force & lazy. It does eventually unmount, but if I remount it it's still unusable.

michaelk · 11-20-2009, 03:40 PM

Need some additional information on you hardware.
Is /home on a separate drive or just another partition?
Are you using RAID?
Look at the output of the dmesg command for errors. It might be that your shutdown issue and this are related.
The hard drive might be failing. You might want to run the manufactures drive diagnostics tools and/or running smartd.