Re: [dm-crypt] Data Corruption - hard drive or DM-crypt?

[Arno Wagner <arno@wagner.name>]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 02:13:45PM +0000, Matt Rosales wrote:
> Hi All,
> I have been experiencing data corruption on my DM-Crypt / LUKS
> system running Jaunty. Most noticeably it happens with my media (music
> dominantly), in the form of read-write errors when copying or moving files,
> and as corrupted songs that worked fine before. It is
> entirely plausible that other parts of my system are corrupt as well, but
> the media is the most noticeable case. This happened before when I was
> running Hardy as well, and so when I upgraded to Jaunty I did a fresh
> install, wiping the partitions before hand. The data corruption may be due
> to a periodic hanging of the system at shut down, which I have not
> discovered the cause of, but which apparently prevents the crypted disks
> from unmounting, as I get errors upon the following boot- however fsck
> doesn't return anything of note! So my question is: How do I determine if I
> have a bad hard disk, bad memory, or merely an improper shutdown problem?

The first step is to determine the precise nature of the corruption.
Is it flipped bits (->RAM), defects in sector size (512B) or blocks
(4kB) (-> disk) or files cut that you just before copied there 
(->shutdown)?

For RAM you can also run memtest86+ for a day or so.
For the disks you can run s long smart selftest and look at
the attributes, both with the smartmontools.

Arno

-- 
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno@wagner.name 
GnuPG:  ID: 1E25338F  FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C  0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

If it's in the news, don't worry about it.  The very definition of 
"news" is "something that hardly ever happens." -- Bruce Schneier