Question on Reiser4 regarding power failures

[Bernhard Prell <bernhard.prell@gmx.net>]

Hello everybody,

I have a simple question about Reiser4. I already tried to find the answer in 
http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html but I'm not completly sure if I understood 
everything :-)

*Background:
I 'm administrating about 20 computers. The installed Linux/Reiser is quite 
old: SuSE Linux with kernel 2.4.7(SMP) (dmesg tells me reiser 3.5.x disk 
format, ReiserFS version 3.6.25).

Obviously people often pull the plug without cleanly shutting down the 
systems, because maybe twice per month I have to setup a system again because 
it doesn't want to boot anymore. The reason is always a somehow corrupted 
root-filesystem. Sometimes reiserfsck can repair it, sometimes not because of 
I/O-read-errors. If that's the case I also have a look at the disk with 
"smartctl -t short /dev/hda" and it also reports read-errors. Then I usually 
do a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda", repartition, reformat, setup the system 
from a tar file and everything is fine again (smartctl doesn't report 
read-errors anymore).

*Now my question, you may have guessed it:
Will the corruption caused by partially written sectors or other problems 
caused by _power failures_ be still a problem under reiser4 or are they gone 
forever because of the "atomic transactions" (at least in theory)?
(That would mean that reiserfsck is only existing to repair problems caused by 
bugs in reiser4...)

Sorry if this has been asked before, I tried to find an answer in the 
list-archive.

Thanks in advance

Bernhard