Re: ext2 filesystem corruption?!?!?? (fwd)

Leonard N. Zubkoff (lnz@dandelion.com)
Mon, 7 Apr 1997 11:06:18 -0700


Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 12:04:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Dave Wreski <tel1dvw@is.ups.com>

On Fri, 4 Apr 1997, Doug Ledford wrote:

> A simple shell script like this will run four simultaneous badblocks
> programs on the drive. A person can then check the files in the /tmp
> directory to see if any were returned as bad. With modern IDE or SCSI
> drives, all of these files should have a zero length unless one of two
> things is true. One, you have a drive developing too many bad sectors to
> be mapped out (which is cause

Ok, I'm willing to run your script on my new Seagate 2.1 Wide, aha2940uw.

The only concern I have is if it does in fact produce an error, how are
we to prove it is not the hard disk, among other things, or the driver?

A return of 0 proves its neither hardware or ext2, but a failure does not
indicate anything.

Sadly, a return of 0 does not *prove* anything. It merely gives you more
confidence that it's neither hardware nor ext2. It's entirely possible for a
test not to trigger a case where the hardware misbehaves, for example, even
though the hardware might still have problems in some scenarios.

Leonard