Hello Fellow Gentoo fans,

I'm working on a Gentoo server at the moment for work and typed the command shutdown -h now and the machine stays idle and will not power down. Any suggestions ?

Hi Chrisroot and welcome to LQ.

For this case I think it would be a good idea for you to post a description of your system, as well as what version of Gentoo you have.

Also, please check your system log and see if there are any entries in it related to your shutdown attempt, and if so, please post the relevant logs.

I'm assuming you received no error from that command, correct?

Well currently, I rebooted the system and it froze on the start up, it states " Kernal panic- not syncing " VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0).

OK, so to be clear, this sounds like a booting problem now. Correct?

If so, are you seeing any prompt at all?

What version of gentoo are you running?

Yes, a booting problem at the moment. Nope, I don't see a prompt at the moment. Sorry unsure of the version of Gentoo. All I know is that its from 2003. And this is the last text on the screen " Kernal panic- not syncing " VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0).

First, with "kernal panic" I'd suggest you get qualified help. If it was "kernel panic" we could discuss possible solutions.
FYI, Gentoo is rolling distro, if left unattended it will be extremely hard to bring it up to date. About 6 months is the limit, after that it gets difficult.

Its KERNEL panic. It was working last night before i left. I gave it the shutdown command which takes a minute or so to shut down and came back this morning and it never actually shut down.

^^ This indicates kernel is unable to access the hard drive. Was there a hardware change, was the HDD controller replaced? Other possible reason is you have initramfs and it is not loaded.

Sounds like the system is booting, but failing in the kernel.

Perhaps a live boot media will allow you to see the disk, check it for errors, repair any errors possibly found, and see if you can then boot.

For me, that old of a system and that level of problem, I'd get my data off of the disk and rebuild it to use a more current version.

There may be other options that other people can offer.

I have to agree, looking at the bottom of your issues it is realistic to assume the hard drive is failing.

Is it possible to repair the errors with or without "fsck" without doing further damage? Or can i go through the system set up and clear the error logs? Sorry I am a newbie at this. Currently, my job is to copy files from the system onto a usb drive for my works website that is being updated. I was in the middle of doing this then the system froze.

Back up the entire drive and try the fsck.

And note that it is not the fsck which may mess up files, it is instead the state of the disk that fsck has to contend with.

For instance, if the RFS is messed up because some file was stuck open when you forcibly shut it down, and maybe that file is benign and can be recreated or whatever data was in there is OK to have lost, then it may be fine. And in that case, perhaps fsck can repair the file "system", but as part of that it cannot resolve the messed up file. Also, don't burn yourself up about having to forcibly shut it down, it clearly wasn't going to shut down, not much you could've done the next morning.

I'd boot it from an external media, attempt a read-only mount of your data partition, if successful copy off everything you can before doing fsck.

Well thanks everyone,

My next question is. What would be the best way to backup these drives even though they dont boot properly.