Hi,

After upgrading to kernel 2.4.10 from 2.4.9, I have encountered
the problem of "/dev/null: input/output error" for two times on my
desktop machine with one Pentium II CPU at 300MHz (a rather old machine
^_^).

The detailed description comes as follow. The first reboot
of the machine immediately after the building and installation
the new kernel will occasionally fail by warning that
"/dev/null: input/output error"  and that it is unable to unlock
the /etc/~mtab file (or something like that), and that it is
unable to mount the /usr file systems (probably as a result of the
previous
error). And the system prompts for root password to enter single user
mode,
but during the next reboot, everything seems to be OK.

Fortunately the root file system has been sucessfully mounted before
the error occurs, but no message available in /var/log/messages. The
problem
has occured twice since I upgraded to 2.4.10. I have no idea about what
had
caused the problem and I am not sure whether I am the only one that had
been hit by the problem. So any idea, friends on this list?

#. The content of my /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda7       /               ext2            defaults        1 1
/dev/hda8       /usr            ext3            defaults        1 2
/dev/hda3       /home           reiserfs        defaults        0 0
/dev/hda6       /mnt/home1      reiserfs        defaults        0 0
/dev/hda9       swap            swap            defaults        0 0
/dev/hda1       /mnt/win98      vfat
auto,ro,user,iocharset=gb2312   0 0
/dev/hda5       /mnt/workd      vfat
auto,ro,user,iocharset=gb2312   0 0
/dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy     vfat
noauto,ro,user,iocharset=gb2312  0 0
/dev/fd0        /mnt/e2floppy   ext2            noauto,user     0 0
/dev/cdrom      /mnt/cdrom      iso9660
noauto,ro,user,iocharset=gb2312  0 0
none            /proc           proc            defaults        0 0
none            /dev/pts        devpts          mode=0622       0 0

#. Version of required software:
o  Gnu C                  2.95.2
o  Gnu make               3.77
o  binutils               2.9.5.0.13
o  util-linux             2.10f
o  modutils               2.4.6
o  e2fsprogs              1.23-WIP, 9-Aug-2001
o  reiserfsprogs          3.x.0j
o  pcmcia-cs              3.0.14
o  PPP                    2.3.9                   # pppd --version.
o  isdn4k-utils           # not present since no isdn support required
on this desktop box

#. configuration file .config is attached to the email