Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13

[Nigel Cunningham <ncunningham@cyclades.com>]

Hi

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 20:28, Sander wrote:
> Rog?rio Brito wrote (ao):
> > On Sep 28 2005, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > > 3) Is the corruption only ever in memory, or seen on disk too?
> > 
> > I have noticed the problem mostly on disk. One strange situation was
> > when I was untarring a kernel tree (compressed with bzip2) and in the
> > middle of the extraction, bzip2 complained that the thing was
> > corrupted.
> > 
> > I removed what was extracted right away and tried again to extract the
> > tree (at this point, suspecting even that something in software had
> > problems). The problem with bzip2 occurred again. Then, I rebooted the
> > system an the problem magically went away.
> 
> That would mean the corruption existed in memory only. The kernel
> tarball got sucked into memory and got corrupted. On reboot, the tarball
> gets read in again, and this time no corruption. The on disk tarball was
> oke it seems.
> 
> If you run memtest86+ (latest version) for at least 24 hours it _should_
> find something.

Assuming that it really is a memory issue. Don't discount the
possibility of a kernel bug too quickly, especially when it apparently
worked fine in the past.

Just my 2c, feel free to discount anyway :)

Regards,

Nigel