[lug] Superblock in the future?

Marty Haught mghaught at gmail.com
Thu Dec 29 21:17:18 MST 2005


Hey Everyone,

I've run into a strange problem that coincided with me attaching a new
monitor to my Dell XPS laptop.  First, I'm running on Debian testing
with the 2.6.12-1-686 kernel.  I just got a new Dell 24" flat screen
monitor and I swapped it with my current 17" Dell flat screen.  I have
an ATI 9800 dual head graphics card which allows me to use both the
laptop screen and an external monitor.  The laptop resolution was
1900x1200 and the 17" had no ability to match that and simply didn't
display parts of the second screen.

So I hook up the new monitor and decide (perhaps foolishly) that I
should use the DVI jack since that's better and the graphics card had
a DVI port.  The laptop failed to boot as it was checking the file
system.  It printed out this message:

Checking root file system.../: Superblock last write time is in the future.

After trying to run fsck manually both with -c and -f options, neither
fixed the issue and it kept encountering the same message.  At the
suggestion of the sys admin at work, I check the bios clock and indeed
it's off.  It turns out that somehow my bios clock was set 26 hours
earlier.  So instead of being noon on Thursday it thought it was 10am
on Wednesday.  So I change that and reboot.  By this time I've removed
the DVI and used the normal VGA plug concerned that all of these
troubles were caused directly by the new monitor (though I'm not sure
if that's even possible).

This time it does get passed the trouble spot but instead says that /
contains a file system with errors, check forced.  After this runs,
the rest of the boot is fine.  The new monitor works fairly well but
I'm guessing I'll need to tweak the xorg config since I was getting
1900x1200 resolution, but that's another issue for another day.

Now it turns out that every time I reboot the machine it hits the same
message about Superblock.  However, the bios clock is just fine now. 
After hitting control-D to reboot, it gets passed this issue but again
complains about / with file system with errors and forces a check. 
Wondering if it's the monitor, I remove it and just reboot the laptop
without a monitor and it's the same thing.  So this seems to suggest
that the problem is no longer related to the monitor (if it ever was).

What do you recommend I do at this point?  I appreciate any
suggestions on how to tackle this.

Cheers,
Marty



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