My morning and a possessed computer

Posted: February 26th, 2009 | Author: Administrator | Filed under: Linux | No Comments »

I came in to work this morning and began my usual routine of removing my backpack, setting my cup of coffee down, setting up my laptop, and then “shaking” the mouse to wake up my desktop computer. (Yes, I bring my laptop to work with me even though I have a desktop PC running Fedora 10.) When the monitor finally kicked in, I was presented with a standard terminal text stating drive sdb2 had read/write failures. Not a very pretty thing to look at first thing in the morning. Instantly, I had visions of read/writes heads crashing into platters and all my un-backed-up data swirling down the proverbial drain. I hit the reset button on the computer and held my breath.

After what seemed an eternity of POST data, a Grub menu was presented. I exhaled. Maybe everything was going to be fine? Maybe the drive had been “put to sleep” and for some reason could not resume from its state of slumber? A bad APM or ACPI driver? A small power surge during the night? I pondered the possibilities. After five seconds, the kernel began loading and I continued my morning routine believing all was well.

Finally sat in front of the desktop, the final bits of the kernel were finishing loading when yet another kernel error reared its head. Though not nearly as severe sounding as the previous error, it still did not bode well:

mount: cannot mount /dev/root on /sysroot

After searching for possible solutions to this well documented “feature”, I booted up a previous Kernel (I knew there was a reason I was keeping a half dozen old Kernels installed on the system) and decided to rebuild the initrd for the latest installed Kernel (2.6.27.15-170.2.24) on my system. I backed up the existing initrd, and ran:

mkinitrd initrd-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686.img 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686

I then rebooted the machine hoping my troubles were now gone. After a lengthy POST, a Grub menu showed up. So far so good. I selected the default (latest) Kernel and again held my breath. After a few moments, the log in (run level 5) screen popped up. Success!

Or so I thought. I quickly logged in and instantly noticed that it was taking forever to load the desktop and never really finished. It didn’t take long before I figured out that Compiz was not loading. What now?! I ensured that the fglrx (I use ATI products) module was indeed loaded at boot:

lsmod | grep fglrx

The fglrx module was indeed being loaded at boot which meant that Xorg was not able to load its drivers for fglrx for whatever reason. On a hunch, as root, I compared time stamps for the various xorg.conf* files to see if any had been modified by a system update. I ran:

ls -lFa /etc/X11/xorg.conf*

Curious. Xorg.conf had indeed been modified the day before. I knew it was not me, so maybe a system update? I compared the current xorg.conf to previous xorg.conf* files and discovered something very bizarre: Two lines from the <files> section were missing. The two lines that were missing were paths to the Xorg modules paths. I copied and pasted the missing lines back into the xorg.conf file, saved, and then exited the text editor. I logged out of my X session and manually rebooted X by pressing:

<ctrl> <alt> <backspace>

I logged back in and everything was back to normal.

The question I have is this: What happened to my machine from the time I left work the previous night to this morning? Did demons crawl into the box and possess it? Very strange.

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