Thursday, July 11, 2013

vmware ubuntu kernel panic

I got a shocked this afternoon when the machine where most of my work is residing decides to kernel panic.

As usual, I turn on my ubuntu vm in vmware to do some code development and only to be greeted by a flashing or blinking caps lock led on my laptop. my keyboard and mouse input froze the moment i click within the vm. Flashing LEDs on a keyboard of a linux machine is an indicator of kernel panic. it is so weird, because I was still using it yesterday.

Pressure and suspense start to build as time pass. If this machine failed me, my setup for development work will be gone and I need to spend time to rebuild it. After spending several hours online desperately looking for a solution to my ubuntu machine's kernel panic, but none works.

I made several speculations about why it kernel panic, but none of my assertions were correct. Assertions such as I need to recompile the kernel, some important sys files are deleted accidentally, HDD saturated with junk, etc. Only when I want to expand the hdd space manually via gparted, than i saw the error message the vmdk is corrupted. Suddenly I recalled that in the morning, my windows7 host machine booted into a chkdsk screen scanning and fixing the hdd for errors.

jackpot. it is easy if you know what you are solving for.

I present to you the command that saves the day (and also my blood, sweat and tears for the last couple of weeks). after this command is entered, I can defrag the vm hdd which means the fix is successful.


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