Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: Htree ate my hard drive, was: post-halloween 0.2

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 01:07:17AM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Oct 31, 2002  07:27 +0100, Duncan Sands wrote:

> > After a bit of switching back and forth between 2.4.19 and 2.5.44,
> > fsck was run while booting 2.4.19 (the usual check because of >30
> > mounts).  There was a message about optimizing directories.  Booting
> > continued but (big surprise) X refused to run.  It turned out that some
> > device files had vanished.

> > tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hdXXX
> > to remove htree support.  No problems since then.

> I wonder if there is still a bug in the e2fsck code for re-hashing
> directories?

Possibly, but I'm more worried about why the fsck did a directory
optimise on reboot, especially on the root filesystem (where /dev is
usually stored).  Doing major fs surgery on a mounted, readonly
filesystem is sort-of safe, but only if you reboot afterwards.
Continuing and remounting read-write can cause all sorts of damage as
the cached fs data no longer matches what's on disk.

Duncan, did you have fsck set up to do a forced htree rebuild on
reboot?

Cheers,
 Stephen