Re: (resend) extent header problems following shrink with resize2fs

[Theodore Tso <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 08:18:48PM +1300, Paul Collins wrote:
> My real concern, which I didn't highlight well and buried way down in my
> original report to boot, was e2fsck blowing up like it did.  Hardware
> being what it is, I imagine at some point extent headers will get
> corrupted, and losing one file is of course preferable to losing the
> entire filesystem.

Yeah, I know about that problem.  It was highlighted recently but what
with the end of the year coming up I haven't had a chance to fix it
yet.  It's an embarassing oversight on my part; I didn't notice that I
failed to handle this case because it happens relatively rarely that
an extent tree has a depth >= 2 in the first place, since this error
only happens when an non-leaf interior node gets corrupted.  I had
left it as an "we'll handle this later" case, and I never got back to
it.  The short-term workaround is simply to use debugfs and use the
clri function:

debugfs -w /dev/sdb1
debugfs: clri <38979>
debugfs: quit

... and then run e2fsck.  I'll get this fixed in the next maintenance
release of e2fsprogs, though, which will be out soon.  We have a few
ext4 related problems that I really need to get fixed and out the
door.

	   	      	      	    	    	- Ted