Re: fs corruption recovery

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>]

On 3/18/15 7:59 PM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> I think that running a 17TB filesystem on ext3 is a recipe for disaster.  They should use ext4 for anything larger than 16TB.

Not only that - impossible, unless you have > 4k page sizes and > 4k blocks.

# mkfs.ext3: Size of device fsfile too big to be expressed in 32 bits
	using a blocksize of 4096.

Are they doing something clever on PPC w/ 64k blocks?

-Eric

> Upgrading e2fsprogs to the latest 1.42.12 is also strongly advised.   
> 
> Cheers, Andreas
> 
>> On Mar 18, 2015, at 18:56, Allison Henderson <achender@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've had some internal folks contact me for help with some
>> customers that are having file system corruption woes. It's been so
>> long since I've done any work on ext3/4 code it's hard for me to
>> advise. So I told them I would run the situation by the folks on
>> these mailing lists to see if I can generate some more ideas for
>> them.
>> 
>> They have a 17 TB ext3 file system on rhel 6.5. Upon reboot, the
>> system was not able to come up and reported errors with the super
>> block.  Right now, getting the machine to boot is not a critical as
>> just recovering customer data. They are able to boot a rescue disk
>> to run fsck and they report that it ran for a short while and
>> showed a lot of inode errors, but eventually it seg faulted. They
>> can re-run the tool, and they were able to progress further on
>> repeated runs, but they do not seem to be able to get further than
>> about 75%. They do not have the fsck core at this point in time,
>> but I'm guessing the tool is likely running out of memory for a
>> file system that large, and they say they are using an old fsck
>> (from 2010). They report having run fsck successfully on large file
>> systems in the past, but normally the machine has 24GB, and this
>> one has only 16GB due to a bad dim. The plan at the moment is for
>> them to fix the bad dim and try the latest fsck.
>> 
>> So the questions they had that I am hoping to get help for is are
>> there any other options they can try for data recovery? I am hoping
>> that the extra memory and the updated fsck might be able to
>> complete, but I'm not sure what has changed in the tool since then.
>> I can assist them to collect more information/cores. Any help is
>> appreciated! Thx!
>> 
>> Allison Henderson
>>
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