REALLY ugly kernel panic

hazmat

hazmat

Rusher of Din
I found some software for syncing my Motorola V60c cell phone to the Mac, so I downloaded it. Before even opening it, I plugged the phone into the keyboard with the Motorola USB data cable. Kernel panic shortly after. After the system taking literally at least 15 minutes to boot after, I tried plugging the phone back in, and within seconds, kernel panic. Why would this be? I have had the phone in before, if briefly just to see if the system would recognize it. The second reboot, I held down cmd-v to see what was happening. During the fsck (I think that's what it was), part of what I saw was:

Invalid Volume File Count
(It should be 455725 instead of 455727)
Invalid Volume File Count
(It should be 455727 instead of 455725)


Does that make sense? Looks very odd to me how it sort of loops.

Thanks for any info.
 
Ooh, that's scary. Start in single user mode with Command-S. When you get to the prompt, do what it says to run fsck. Run it a few times and see if it looks like it's actually fixing the problem. If not, your filesystem may be irreparably hosed (to put it technically.)
 
Well I thought that WAS fsck. I'll try it anyway. not sure about it being fubar, though. Otherwise it seems to be acting just fine. I'm in it right now.
 
Easy there folks, this isn't really a big deal.

The system crashed.
Filesystem i/o events were interrupted.
Inconsistencies were introduced into the filesystem.
On reboot, fsck found and repaired the inconsistencies.

This is why fsck is run after an abnormal shutdown. When you start to worry is when fsck fails on reboot... that's bad news.

That being said, davidbrit2 is right that it's never a bad idea to run fsck again manually after a crash.

BTW, I'll bet you have a big sytem disk. fsck can take forever on a disk of any appreciable size. On some older systems with large filesystems the consitency checks can take hours. This is one of the benefits of the journaling filesystem we're hopefully getting.

-alex.
 
Alex, yeah, I have a 60 gig disk. So what I posted from the fsck looked okay? Seemed weird about it saying that it should have been the other number, then saying it should have been the first one that it said wasn't right.
 
Did you run fsck again? What did it say? If it returned with no problems then you're fine.

As to the 'loop,' well, like I said, if it's not hapening over and over again (that is to say with multiple invocations of fsck) then it's no big deal. As a guess, it fixed the volume file count, then re-attached two inodes which changed the count again.

Fsck is pretty good about giving up when it actually can't fix something, so if it exited cleanly, you can usually trust that things are OK.

At any rate, boot into single-user and run fsck again... and again, until you see no errors (and if you see no errors the first time through, well, then you're done)

Hope this helps...
-alex
 
I did last night again. I booted into single user mode, ran fsck, and it gave me those messages again. When it ended, I ran fsck again. Same exact messages the second time. I needed to use the system, so I stopped there and rebooted. I can try more tonight. But if the same exact results happen every time, what would this mean?
 
Hmmm.... Sounds like an inconsistancy that fsck isn't handling properly. Do you own Norton or Drive 10? If so, now would be the time to run them. If not, well, you can probably get away with running like that for quite some time, if not forever. If you have a second drive and some time to kill, you could always back up, reformat, and reinstall, but that's the ugliest available option. A third party disk utility is the way to go (if you don't have one, I would strongly reccomend you pick one up; you really shouldn't be without one).

-alex.
 
Yes, I have Disk Warrior. I'll run it tonight. Just in case, I do have a second 60 gig drive in there. I've been thinking of doing a clean reinstall anyway.

Thanks again for the help.
 
Wow. I ran DiskWarrior last night from the boot cdrom and it found a lot of issues. I couldn't save the long report page, but a lot seemed to be on the Unix layer, most being man pages. But the main point is that it said that it was basically too fubar to repair. Strange, since for the most part the system seems to be working fine. I have a second 60 gig in there which has just some media files, like iMovie projects, on it. What I think I will do is get everything off that drive and switch master and slave and do a 10.2 install onto that and start fresh. I have configured my system so nicely that I hate to do it, but I guess it's unavoidable. I guess copying back my entire home directory should get back most of my configs. Any other suggestions before I do the install?
 
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