Re: Fatal File System Corruption -Software RAID + NFS

[Steven Poulakos <poulakos@uiuc.edu>]

Thanks, Dan and Christian, for the offered advice (below).  It turns out 
that my problems were hardware related and not with Reiserfs.  One of 
the IDE cables had a small knick in it with exposed wire.  This was 
probably the source of errors that caused the file system corruption.

Unfortunately, I can't be absolutely certain of this because I also 
upgraded my motherboard to one that supports a 66MHz PCI bus.  This 
allows the Promise ATA/100 controller card to work at full speed. 

My newly rebuilt system has been up and running for three days now.  So 
far, there aren't any errors.

Thanks, again!

Steve

Dan Oglesby wrote:

> Christian Kujau wrote:
>
>> Steven Poulakos wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>> Here are snippets of the errors that just repeat over and over...
>>>
>>> Nov  9 06:47:34 ctdev kernel: hdc: status error: status=0x58 { 
>>> DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
>>> Nov  9 06:47:34 ctdev kernel:
>>> Nov  9 06:47:34 ctdev kernel: hdc: status error: status=0x58 { 
>>> DriveReady SeekCo
>>
>>
>>
>> hardware errors, i'd say :-(
>> try to dd / dd_rescue to a working disk, then go on with newest 
>> reiserfsprogs or /bin/cat...
>>
>> Christian.
>> -
>
>
> I saw these types of errors on my software RAID-5 array when I first 
> brought it online.  The array is made up of four 20GB hard drives from 
> four different manufacturers, two drives to an IDE channel.  Some of 
> the drives didn't want to play nice when sharing the IDE channel.
>
> Using hdparm, I found that not all drives were enabling DMA or 32-bit 
> transfers, so I forced all of the hard drives to run 32-bit with DMA. 
> This solved the problem.
>
> Another interesting thing I found (while I'm talking about my goofy 
> array) was that the system performed MUCH better when I disabled write 
> caching on all of the hard drives.
>
> The filesystem is ReiserFS 3.6, of course.
>
> --Dan