Monday, May 28, 2012

Hadoop: "Format aborted" Error Message


I have recently started playing around with hadoop. I went through a bunch of tutorials and docs and installed it on a Centos 6 box. When I tried to start the namenode, it gave me an error informing that my namenode dir is not formatted. Fair enough but whenever I tried to format it, it used to get aborted. I checked all the configs, user, group, permissions and what not. I read and reread the docs to figure out if I am missing anything but no luck. Every time I got the following error:

-bash-4.1$ hadoop namenode -format
12/05/28 07:33:42 INFO namenode.NameNode: STARTUP_MSG:
/************************************************************
STARTUP_MSG: Starting NameNode
STARTUP_MSG:   host = hadoop1.staging.example.com/10.10.54.143
STARTUP_MSG:   args = [-format]
STARTUP_MSG:   version = 0.20.2-cdh3u4
STARTUP_MSG:   build = file:///data/1/tmp/topdir/BUILD/hadoop-0.20.2-cdh3u4 -r 214dd731e3bdb687cb55988d3f47dd9e248c5690; compil
ed by 'root' on Mon May  7 14:01:59 PDT 2012
************************************************************/
Re-format filesystem in /data/namenode ? (Y or N) y
Format aborted in /data/namenode
12/05/28 07:33:46 INFO namenode.NameNode: SHUTDOWN_MSG:
/************************************************************
SHUTDOWN_MSG: Shutting down NameNode at hadoop1.staging.example.com/10.10.54.143
************************************************************/


There were no logs or messages to analyze. Every things looked in order then what was the issue?

Turned out that when the CLI asked me "Re-format filesystem in /data/namenode ? (Y or N)" I was supposed to hit upper case Y and not y. I found this quite bad and un-intuitive on developers' part that they did not implement case-insensitivity or gave out a message about hitting upper case when a lower case was entered. I just hope that this post might save someone some time.
Posted by at 1:37 AM
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11 comments:

  1. Gaurav MenghaniMay 29, 2012 at 12:11 AM

    I faced the exact same problem :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Larry MatterJune 18, 2012 at 12:05 AM

    Thank you for posting this. I had the exact same problem.

    ReplyDelete
  3. marsty5February 1, 2013 at 5:28 AM

    Oh God, I spent one day trying to figure this out... Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. padmalcomJuly 18, 2013 at 3:41 AM

    Had the same problem, thanks for the post!

    ReplyDelete
  5. anishAugust 11, 2013 at 12:26 PM

    thank you so much! i was going nuts. would've never figured that out.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Outer withinOctober 23, 2013 at 6:36 AM

    You've got to be kidding me, why didn't the developers just add half a line of code? I also spent a few hours on this. Thanks for the fix!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Andrew BeakFebruary 7, 2014 at 4:19 AM

    Thanks mate, I facepalmed myself after reading this.

    ReplyDelete
  8. JRomasMarch 18, 2015 at 7:17 AM

    Thanks a lot! That was really helpful!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Love_PathakMay 9, 2015 at 12:27 PM

    same same .. :D

    ReplyDelete
  10. Monika raghuvanshiJuly 22, 2015 at 2:23 PM

    OMG... I am sitting with this issue since last night.. now saw your post... thanks soooooooo much :)

    ReplyDelete
  11. UnknownOctober 1, 2015 at 7:02 AM

    thanks a lot ..... jaw dropped at the sill'Y'ness ..........

    ReplyDelete

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