Re: "Forever" fsck?

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:25:21 -0400, Andrew Gideon staggered into the
Black Sun and said:
Restarting e2fsck from the beginning...
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Inode 7 has illegal block(s). Clear? yes
Illegal block #20494 (1156635280) in inode 7. CLEARED.
[snip]
Too many illegal blocks in inode 7.
Clear inode? yes

If you're going to answer "Y" to everything, why not use e2fsck -y ?

Restarting e2fsck from the beginning...
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Inode 7 has illegal block(s). Clear? yes
[snip]
Too many illegal blocks in inode 7.
Clear inode? yes

This is an ext3 file system which is just about empty. However, it
has 300+G of capacity and when I ran df on it it showed about 90+G in
use.

There is something beyond normal filesystem problems here. Inode 7 is
right before the journal inode (8, usually), and it may have some sort
of special meaning/use in ext3. I didn't see anything in a cursory grep
through /usr/src/linux/fs/ext3/ , but IANAFilesystemGuru. Check dmesg
and make sure you're not seeing messages like "hdXY: error 131072
(BAD_CRUD) reading sector 12".

I do see that the block numbers are increasing, even though it is
always inode 7. So this doesn't at least appear to be an *infinite*
loop. Is there any better way to fix this problem (whatever the
problem is)? And what *is* the problem here?

This is probably some sort of hardware error, maybe combined with a
bizarre filesystem corruption problem. If you're sure that there's no
hardware problem, the quickest/easiest way to get back to normal is
probably to mke2fs -j the partition.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / I don't practice what I preach, because I'm
-----------------------------/ not the kind of person I'm preaching to.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Secure NFS (sNFS) on 4-Stable: has somebody succeeded?
    ... > Exactly same sizes!! ... Yes, those are hardlinks: ... Note that inode numbers are the same. ... Atlantis ISP, System Administrator ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: ufs - fsck_ffs problem
    ... ** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes ... UNKNOWN FILE TYPE I=2 ... If inode 2 is messed up, then you may have lost the root directory ... to actually be quite common. ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: dio_get_page() lockdep complaints
    ... inode. ... One would expect this sort of thing to be happening in an ... Possibly one could perform this operation on the final iput, but I suspect the ... locking situation there would be even more complex. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: optimal file order for reading from disk
    ... >> I know several projects that sort on inode number and benefit from ... > should be good for new filesystems, but maybe sorting by ... You should call fibmap ioctl on all files, to obtain lists of block ... and then sort file list to minimize seeks. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • RE: sort files by creation time
    ... > Subject: RE: sort files by creation time ... probably don't want to sort by the inode. ...
    (perl.beginners)