[arch-general] Shutdown and reboot not working after last weekend update

[pants]

It sounds like you might have had a process in uninterpretable sleep.
This happens sometimes when a process is in a system call and stops
working.  You can check for this by launching htop and seeing if any
processes are permanently in the 'D' state (in the column labeled 'S').
Alternatively, look in /var/log/errors.log and see if you can find
messages which look like:

> INFO: task [processinfo] blocked for more than 120 seconds.

If you do have a process in this state, you won't be able to kill it or
unmount the filesystem that it's stuck modifying.  Your best bet is to
manually kill everything you can, manually umount everything you can,
and then force the system down.  It sucks, I've had to do this with
processes stuck writing to a RAID and then have to wait for a few days
while the whole thing is resynced.

It also probably isn't the fault of an upgrade, just some piece of buggy
software that finally hit its error.  I know that xfs_fsr will quickly
and deterministically go into it when run on a filesystem which is
almost full.

Good luck!

pants.

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 05:22:43PM -0300, Victor Silva wrote:
> I got a ubuntu livecd with gparted lets see what happens. About using
> thesystem as root. I only run pacman related commands as root have  a user
> I use for mostly day tasks. This user is *NOT* on sudo, basically cause I
> like to enforce my self to login as root and think about what I'm doing.
> Also sudo is cumbersome to use in some instances as buil-in commands are
> not avaliable.
> 
> So the only thing I've run as root was the pacman -Syu and followed the
> arch announces regarding the updates. Nothing bad there I'mho. And the
> problem I'm facing now has nothing to do with my system usage. Imho either
> I have a bad sector or something went broken for some instances of the
> system like mine or the other guy who also reported on the forums.
> 
> Regards,
> Victor
> 
> 2012/6/12 Attila Vangel <vangel.attila at gmail.com>
> 
> > Hi, I am not familiar with the problem, but I think the easiest way
> > (if you are not against graphical tools) is to grab a live cd (or
> > "live usb dongle") containing gparted (it's not a bad thing to have,
> > anyway), but I am not an expert at this.
> >
> > What really surprises me is that you use your system as root !?! I
> > would not dare to do that. I tend to add my user to various groops
> > according to the arch wiki documentation where neeeded, and for the
> > other commands I think I can safely run as root I alias them to be
> > 'sudo <command>', and I maintain this list of safe commands in
> > /etc/sudoers (edited by visudo (you can change the editor of it, just
> > google it)), so that these commands can be executed without entering
> > the password all the time... Maybe not the best thing still, but I
> > guess it's OK with me.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Attila
> >
> > 2012/6/12 Victor Silva <vfbsilva at gmail.com>:
> > <snip>
> > > Folks after the last upgrade I can no longer shutdown nor reboot my
> > machine
> > > (I'm using it as root). The command simply hangs and nothing happens.
> > <snip>
> >
> > > I was asked to perform a fsck which failed.It reported /dev/sda5 was
> > > mounted. Is there any proper way I should use to call fsck? I did create
> > a
> > > /fsck file on / is there other more appropriate command to do it?
> > Problably
> > > you asked for my fstab expecting an error like this right? Would it be
> > > better to run fsck from a livecd?
> > >
> > > regards,
> > >
> > > Victor
> >
>