[Gllug] Error message

[rich at annexia.org]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 11:18:12AM -0000, Leigh Mason wrote:
> When I logged in this morning, the monitor screen was covered
> with this:
> 
> Directory sread (sector 0x20) failed
> Directory sread (sector 0x20) failed
> Directory sread (sector 0x20) failed
> Directory sread (sector 0x20) failed
> 
> There wasn't any command prompt, but I could regain it with ^C.
> A search in Google seems to point towards an incorrectly mounted floppy
> drive? Also, If I use: `find / -name filename` I receive the same error.
> 
> The only thing that I have recently changed, is place a new entry into
> crontab using the crontab -e command - not sure if this could be
> responsible?

The error comes from the FAT filesystem (specifically fs/fat/misc.c
in the kernel). This means that you must have a FAT (msdos) filesystem
mounted somewhere - perhaps a floppy or a Windows drive if you dual-boot.

The error indicates that this disk is failing. If it's a floppy - don't
worry, just copy all the data off and bin it. It's a hard disk, then
you may have more problems ahead.

As to why this appeared overnight, I'm thinking it's probably down to
the script which runs nightly to rebuild the locate database. That scans
the entire disk (unless you specifically exclude bits by editing
/etc/updatedb.conf).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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