From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Kuba Ober Subject: Re: Scrambled Files Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 08:26:09 -0400 Message-ID: <200204240826.09390.kuba@mareimbrium.org> References: <20020423210501.GA28270@willow.seitz.com> <3CC5E81E.7080903@namesys.com> <20020424033202.GA30417@willow.seitz.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: In-Reply-To: <20020424033202.GA30417@willow.seitz.com> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Ross Vandegrift Cc: reiserfs-list@namesys.com > > >2. Is the corruption in any way deterministic? For example, does > > > it only affect files that have been modified since the last > > > sync, or perhaps files that are in the process of being modified > > > at the time the system goes down? > > In my case it seemed to affect file that were either 1) recently written > (probably in cache somewhere) 2) being written. > > For example, apt-get was messing around with xfs when it died. xfs was > completely hosed, as were a bunch of things related to X. However, the > files were hosed with completely non-deterministic contents - german > text, what appeared to be UUEncoded binaries, random data, as well as > some kind of regular-looking data. It wasn't like a bunch of the writes > got crossed and files ended up backwards. It also wasn't like random > junk was written. What you see might be a result of metadata corruption rather than file contents corruption. The metadata might be pointing to astray places, which are either used or unused-but-previously-written-to places on the drive. It may even be that the data from original files is sitting there intact. As a side note: did you try fsck'ing the filesystem? Cheers, Kuba