Lately I've been having issues with one of my drives. Everytime I go to sync emplode locks while checking media. I've been getting around it by running the following commands at shell that I found in the FAQ:

ro
umount /dev/hda4
umount /dev/hdc4
swapon /swapfile
fsck -fay /
fsck -fay /dev/hda4
fsck -fay /dev/hdc4
swapoff /swapfile
sync

This works for a few hours/days? But I always end up having to do it again... I've had to do this 4 times in the last week... Any ideas? And end up in here making silly posts like this one

Greetings!

How long is it locking for and how big are your drives? Emplode will do the same fsck on the drives, and it will look locked while this is happening. For big drives, this can be on the order of an hour and a half (dual 60s).

As to working for a few days / hours - something is wrong. Usually, there is a counter that will tell how many mounts were done on the drives. When that number reaches a threshold (I think 30), it will force a check on sync.

Are you leaving the drives open in read/write mode? Something is marking the drives as dirty if you see the problem that soon after a sync.

How long is it locking for and how big are your drives?

I let it go all night last time.... when I checked it the next morning it'd just timed out with some errors (which I stupidly forgot to jot down) the drives are both 30 gigs... one Toshiba and one Fujitsu ( I think).

Are you leaving the drives open in read/write mode?

The last couple of days I've been very careful not to do so... and I've still been having the problem. I also had a problem recently in which it forced a database rebuild on every boot. I fixed that, but this problem has been with me for a while now.

Do you get any errors when you fsck from command line?

Does it fail this check (force disk check) next time you sync after that, or if not, when afterward?

What version of the software are you running, and do you have a custom pre-init (i.e., empacman)?

Do you get any errors when you fsck from command line?
this is what the output of the fsck is

hijack: removed menu entry: "Hard Disk Detection"
khttpd: listening on port 80
kftpd: listening on port 21
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta13 2002/07/24.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jul 24 2002
Vcb: 0x4086d000
q
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Player exited normally: 0
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
empeg:/empeg/bin# ro
empeg:/empeg/bin# umount /dev/hda4
empeg:/empeg/bin# umount /dev/hdc4
empeg:/empeg/bin# swapon /swapfile
Adding Swap: 16028k swap-space (priority -1)
empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda5 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/hda5: 1572/4096 files (0.4% non-contiguous), 9629/16384 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /dev/hda4
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda4 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/hda4: 9564/228160 files (27.7% non-contiguous), 25900744/29198137 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /dev/hdc4
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hdc4 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/hdc4: 11131/228352 files (4.5% non-contiguous), 6192164/7304850 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin# swapoff /swapfile
empeg:/empeg/bin# sync

After I run this... everything is fine... for a little while.
I'm running version 2.00-beta 11

Have you seen any symptoms that would seem like a lockup, or other reason to reboot the player while in read/write? I cannot think of much else that would be causing this kind of behavior.

Good point.... I haven't noticed any lockups... but I normally bring it in when I'm at work and for some reason it seems to reboot itself every 45 minutes or so.

Greetings!

Reboots every 45 minutes? Could someone in the office be messing around with your xml interface? These reboots, if any hit while the drives are r/w, will certainly mark your filesystems as needing to sync.

I doubt anyone's rebooting it.... it's possible but only one other person knows about it and he shares the office with me. The reboots seem kind of random.

Greetings!

Hm... I don't know then. The only thing I can recommend is to leave a terminal session open and logging, hoping to catch any error messages that wander by. I don't know what else to look at from here.

Thanks I'll try that.... thanks for all your help