Re: Recover broken git index?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 28, 2009, 21:20 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0905281413130.3435@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <4A1EFBE9.7070805@bcm.edu>

On Thu, 28 May 2009, Misha Koshelev wrote:

> 
> Actually it was technically a _clean_ restart on Ubuntu 8.04. I suspect
> there may have been some kind of strange hardware error though as
> computer was very sluggish and BIOS took a while to start up.

You may have had a disk that flaked out (disconnected from the SATA bus or something). Sadly, when that happens, the messages obviously don't make it to /var/log/messages, but you might have had them in your log when you rebooted. Things like

	ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
	ata1: hard resetting port
	ata1 SRST failed (errno=-19)
	ata1: reset failed (errno=-19), retrying in 10 secs
	...

and sometimes the problem doesn't go away until power is actually disconnected, or a hard reset is performed.

It could be a one-time event, but it could also be a sign of something bad going on with the disk. Since you likely don't have any messages anywhere, it's hard to even guess what is going on. But your symptoms are consistent with that (sluggish simply because some things try to read or write to disk and will fail after a _loong_ timeout, and BIOS taking a while to start up because it probably does some really fundamental reset thing to get the controller back)..

Of course, that's just a guess.

		Linus