FATAL error message

FATAL error message

[Jim McCloskey]

Hello. I hope it's OK to ask a help question here rather than a
developer's question.

kernel: 2.6.7
udev:  version 0.032 packaged for Debian testing

All was working very well for me. Then I had two hard shutdowns in a
row caused by power-failures. On the second re-boot, I got this message:

  FATAL: udev still active on /dev/

And it won't go away after several cycles of clean shutdown followed
by reboot.  I can't actually say that anything is broken. Device files
are still created:

Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa2'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs4'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa4'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs3'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs5'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa5'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa6'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs6'
Oct 10 08:03:44 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa3'
Oct 10 08:03:45 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs2'

I can mount and un-mount usb devices as needed, I can play
sound-files, use alsamixer, and so on. So far, the only source of
worry is the warning message itself.  But that big word FATAL all in
capital-letters is not reassuring.

I've looked for the error-message on Google and on various mailing
lists and not found anything. I've gone through the docs in
/usr/share/doc. I've stopped and re-started the udev init-script but
that had no more effect than re-booting and produces the same warning
message (unsurprisingly). I've also removed and re-installed the udev
package. The message persists through all of this.

My suspicion is that there is some temporary file that should have been
deleted in the course of a clean shutdown which has not been, but I
would really appreciate any advice that might be available here.

Thanks to all for a really great utility,

Jim McCloskey


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Re: FATAL error message

[Jim McCloskey]

I wrote:

|> All was working very well for me. Then I had two hard shutdowns in a
|> row caused by power-failures. On the second re-boot, I got this
|> message:
|>
|>   FATAL: udev still active on /dev/
|>
|> And it won't go away after several cycles of clean shutdown followed
|> by reboot.  
                       ....

|> My suspicion is that there is some temporary file that should have
|> been deleted in the course of a clean shutdown which has not been, but
|> I would really appreciate any advice that might be available here.

I was able to solve this problem (on the basis of some advice on the
Debian-user mailing list) by deleting .udev.tdb in /dev. 
I had tried deleting the file previously, but I suspect that what I
was deleting was a copy in tmpfs. To really delete the file on the
disk, I had to boot with init=/bin/sh, mount / by hand and then rm
/dev/.udev.tdb.

There's a lot I don't understand about what happened here, but the
immediate problem at least seems to have been resolved,

Jim


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Re: FATAL error message

[Kay Sievers]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 06:39:33AM -0700, Jim McCloskey wrote:
> 
> I wrote:
> 
> |> All was working very well for me. Then I had two hard shutdowns in a
> |> row caused by power-failures. On the second re-boot, I got this
> |> message:
> |>
> |>   FATAL: udev still active on /dev/
> |>
> |> And it won't go away after several cycles of clean shutdown followed
> |> by reboot.  
>                        ....

This seems like a debian specific issue, as the debian udev refuses to
run udevstart a second time, if it finds a udevdb in /dev. Please file
the bug in the debian bugtracker.

Thanks,
Kay


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