# FreeBSD 9.3 reboot after panic ffs_valloc dup alloc



## balaji18 (Oct 9, 2014)

Hi,

I have installed FreeBSD 9.3 and all was working fine until yesterday when suddenly the system started to reboot. The message is


```
savecore: reboot after panic: ffs_valloc: dup alloc
savecore: writing core to vmcore.0
writing crash summary to /var/crash/core.txt.0.
```
After this, *I* am able to log in only in single user mode. Multi user mode always results in a reboot. The crash summary as said above does not exist and in place i find a  minfree file at /var/crash with just 2048 as its content (matching the system memory of 2 GB or 2048 MB). Already i have done a fsck after logging in in single user mode.

Still the error persists.

Thanks,
Balaji.


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## SirDice (Oct 9, 2014)

Try booting to single user mode and running a full fsck(8) without using the journal.


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## aupanner (Oct 9, 2014)

Sometimes _RAM_ goes bad. It might be worth running memtest86+ for a few hours and see if anything pops up.

Also sometimes disks go bad. I once had a disk that was corrupting writes to swap and the only indication was random core dumps and infrequent panics.


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## balaji18 (Oct 10, 2014)

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. I installed FreeBSD 10 and it's working right now. The pain point is the back up and restoring it. Hopefully, i don't repeat.

My observations 

1) During boot, after syslogd is started, the process seems to look for core dumps.
2) With current working install(FreeBSD 10), since there are no core dumps, boot is fine.
3) In case if there is a core dump, i think the boot process is trying to act and then reboot after the messages as posted by me earlier. This is with previous FreeBSD 9.3.

This is purely my observation and it may be right or wrong. But what i need to understand is the core file. During installation, i enabled the core dump location to be /var/crash and nothing seems to be found there. This makes me clueless for next action step.

Thanks,
Balaji.


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## SirDice (Oct 10, 2014)

Core dumps don't work if you're on ZFS.


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