Re: e2fsck compatibility problem with 2.4.17?

Andreas Dilger
2002-02-19T21:16:35Z

On Feb 19, 2002 08:11 -0600, Joao Guimaraes da Costa wrote:
> I am having a problem that might be due to an incompatibility between
> e2fsck and kernel 2.4.17.
>
> My machine has a redhat kernel 2.4.3-12 and a kernel 2.4.17 I have
> recently built from source.
>
> While doing a routine filesystem check at boot time (running kernel
> 2.4.17), e2fsck found a problem with one of the partitions (I am using
> e2fsck 1.25 from the redhat rawhide rpm e2fsprogs-1.25-2.i386.rpm).
>
> I decided not to fix the problem and checked it with a different kernel
> and version 1.19 of e2fsck. In both cases, the partition was clean.
>
> So, I get:
>
> kernel e2fsck result
> 2.4.17 1.25 problem
> 2.4.3-12 1.25 OK
> 2.4.3-12 1.19 OK
>
> Are there any know incompatibilities between kernel 2.4.17 and e2fsck
> 1.25? Right now, I am not sure if the filesystem is damaged or not!
>
> The error I get is the following:
> 1) e2fsck gets stuck after only checking 2.5% of the partition. It stays
> there for about 5 minutes doing clik-clak noises until starting giving
> errors
> 2) First error is:
> Block 32783 - 32791 (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in
> short read) while doing inode scan.
> 3) Then in Pass 2:
> resources in /src/linux-2.4.3/drivers/acpi (1894) has deleted/unused
> inode 16435.

Well, this clik-clak noise sounds like a hardware problem. I don't know
why it would only show up under 2.4.17 and not 2.4.3.

Can you try "dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/null bs=4k" to see if this completes
under both kernels? Any messages in 'dmesg' that look like IDE errors?

The one thing I also thought of was that kernels 2.4.10+ have the block
devices in page cache, and some people have problems with ulimits when
reading >2GB from the device, but that wouldn't affect block 32783...

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger