Re: Serious ext2fs problem

Chris Adams (cadams@ro.com)
Tue, 31 Dec 1996 09:02:40 -0600 (CST)


Once upon a time, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote
> EXT2-fs error (device 08:31): ext2_new_block: Free blocks count corrupted for block group 546
>
> Please read the e2fsck man page about "reporting bugs", where it
> describes how to report a coherent bug report so that I have a chance of
> trying to help you. (Silly things like exactly which version of e2fsck
> you are using, etc....)

Okay, sorry about that. I used e2fsck 1.04 (from RedHat 4.0). I also
tried e2fsck 1.06 (from tsx-11). I am not including the output of
dumpe2fs (which the man page says can be useful) because it is several
megabytes. The full version string from e2fsck -V is

e2fsck 1.04, 16-May-96 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09

> Also, you *did* run fsck using the -f flag, to force checking the
> filesystem, *right*? :-)

Yes. I even ran it twice, just to be sure. Of course, it takes quite a
while to fsck a 10 gig filesystem that is 80% full of news.

> Fsck most certainly does check to make sure the free block count is
> correct. So either there's some sort of kernel bug, or hardware bug,
> assuming that e2fsck really had a chance to do its thing. (If the clean
> bit was set, even though the filesystem had errors, using the -f flag is
> important since it forces e2fsck to check the filesystem even if the
> clean bit is set.)

My guess would be a kernel bug, because the problem appears to go away
when I umount and then mount the filesystem.

-- 
Chris Adams - cadams@ro.com
System Administrator - Renaissance Internet Services