B3 won't boot

[philgaskin]

I shutdown my B3 to replace batteries in my UPS. When I reconnected it, I get the dreaded purple led. After 11 seconds the LED goes off briefly before turning purple forever.
I plan on trying rescuing it by USB but wondered if the LED flash identifies anything?
Any ideas?

Phil

[philgaskin]

OK so I can get in using the rescue technique and I have also performed a reinstallation of just the root partition with no joy. Looking in the checkfs log it appears there is a problem with my home directory and maybe I need to be more patient because maybe it is reparing the filesystem with an fsck.
Is this correct? Or will it just sit here forever on the purple LED. i would have thought it would still allow me access via SSH if the root partition was good and just the home has a problem?
Any help is appreciated
Phil.

[Gordon]

If it runs fsck during boot then you'll have to wait for that to finish before you can get back into the system. The problem here is that there is no console, so you can't answer any questions that this process may ask you. If you can boot it with the rescue USB you should be able to manually run fsck and that should be a lot less frustrating than waiting for the led to change colour.

[Cheeseboy]

I had a similar problem some time ago.
The problem with the rescue boot is that it hasn't got support for LVM, so you cannot do fsck on the /home file system when booted from that.

Please note that what I've put in the code segments below is written from my memory of doing this months ago. Please do not copy/paste, only use as a general guide.

What I did was:
1. Booted using the rescue USB

2. Mounted /dev/sda1:

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# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt

3. Edited /mnt/etc/fstab and commented out the line that mounts /home:

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#/dev/mapper/bubba-storage       /home   ext3    defaults        0       2

4. Created a new temporary home directory for me and admin on /dev/sda1

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# mkdir /mnt/home/yourusername
# mkdir /mnt/home/admin
# chmod -r 777 /mnt/home/*

5. I think I had problems getting it to boot without creating the file .bubbacfg in the temporary admin home directory.
I remember I had to copy the contents from my old B2.
This is the contents of mine:

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AllowRemote=no
default_locale=
hotfix=yes
network_profile=router
run_wizard=no
show_sideboard=0

6. Rebooted normally, ignoring all the errors in the logs caused by the missing /home/storage etc.

7. Made sure the LV was activated

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$ sudo lvs

(and if needed)

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$ sudo lvchange bubba/storage -a y

8. Ran fsck

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$ sudo fsck -t ext3 /dev/mapper/bubba-storage

9. Once done, rebooted with rescue stick, uncommented the line in fstab, removed temporary home directories, and reverted any other temporary changes I might have had to do to get it to boot, before finally booting normally again with everything working.

[philgaskin]

Thank you for your replies. It's a shame that there isn't some visual indication that fsck is running when you can't access via SSL. Maybe red on the LED.
Anyway I managed to finally get in although looking at the logs it seems my disk may be beyond saving
I managed to copy most of the files I hadn't already backed up although some failed with I/O errors. I rebooted and it went into another fsck session

So I have just ordered a new disk - at least my B3 is OK. I went for a WD red disk this time and hopefully will get more than 2 years life from it as it has a 3 year warranty

[rog]

I am having what seems to be a very similar problem - came home from work last week, and my B3 was just blinking purple at me. I haven't done anything with it yet, as I haven't backed it up in some time (like a jackass), and would really, really hate to lose the wordpress website that I'm running on it. I reckon I'll try the USB approach, and hopefully, I'll be able to back up /var (and whatever else needs to be backed up) from there.

[johannes]

sorry you are having problems. As a (small) consolidation - once you have your new drives up and running try returning the disks to WD, most of them have a 3 year warranty. You can check on their web site if the warranty is still valid (use the serial number on the disks).

...provided of course that our two-year warranty has expired, otherwise we'd be happy to help of course.