Something strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

Hi maemo-talk,

as this is my first post because I very recently bought my own n900, I firstly want to say hello to everybody! :)

First about my setup: I flashed my n900 with the pwnphone image and downloaded some additional apps I liked from the repos. Everything went fine so far.

Very recently I got some alerts, that messages can neither be sent, nor received, because I am running low on internal memory. I checked my rootfs and found out, that it only has 22 mb left on it (a query on a search engine revealed, that this appears to be a very common problem which evolves from the small root-partition with very fast access to speed up the phone....)

So far so good.

But now, I don't receive these messages anymore but instead am completely refused to do some changes on my phone:

• I cannot delete messages from my sms inbox
• I cannot change my tracker cfg (pressing "save" will do nothing)
• I cannot install updates on any app or the OS (message is - of course - about a low memory state)

Most recently, I even can't use aptitude anymore (it says "unable to write to /var/cache/apt", no matter which operation I try to perform with apt-get...)

I know, what most of you would advise in the first place. "Reflash everything and there you go.."
But this is against my nature as I developed a real weakness for debugging and I surely won't be satisfied until I get the cause (I could end up with the exact same problem after the reflash anyways - I bought the phone three days ago..)

TL;DR:
Are there any known bugs about some syspaths being locked as soon as there is few space left? Any other possible origins for the trouble I am encountering?
Is there another advice on getting the rootfs-problem out of the world (I tried moveroot.sh, but with almost no success: 300kb were freed)

Thank you so much in advance, guys!
best regards

Re: Somethin strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

I'd say you need to fsck -a your partitions as that is most probable the cause of your lack of writing rights.

Lovely to read you'd rather tinker with your device, than simply reflash it.

Re: Somethin strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

I have 4MB left @/ and 5MB@MyDocs and still running.

Re: Somethin strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

Good idea. Currently booting backupmenu to check.. reporting in after fsck. Thanks.


okay, nice fact, thanks. so it is not a problem of an autolock or something but rather some corruption at os / fs level...

Re: Something strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

I'd assume FS corruption. Please report back!

BTW, Don_F, that's the lowest amount of free space I've seen in use without people freaking out!

Re: Something strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

okay, so now I'm stuck on entering backupmenu:

booting with keyboard out.
error appears:
"error: cp /usr/sbin/evkey /tmp/disk/usr/sbin/ Code: 1
cp: can't stat 'usr/sbin/evkey: No such file or directory...
Press any key to continue..."

which also appeared during pwnphone image installation, but back then, I just pressed any key and continued to backupmenu. This time hitting any key available simply won't do nothing. I also tried to reinstall / update backupmenu (which was successful), but that didn't change anything... :confused:

Re: Something strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

Okay, I think I just need to put my head into all this and get way more experienced with the maemo system architecture before I can tinkle efficiently. Reflashing now... ;)

Thread can be closed, thanks for your help!

Re: Something strange seems to have happened to my rootfs
 

should have fixed the backupmenu issue ;)