Re: ext2 and unlink(2)
Brian White (bcwhite@verisim.com)
Tue, 30 Sep 1997 11:10:43 -0400
> This has come up several times recently...it seems as though some recent
> change in e2fsck must be doing things very differently to produce this
> sort of problem. I think I remember reading that the only solution is to
> umount the partition in question and use ext2ed on it to delete the files.
>
> No, it's not a change in e2fsck, as far as I can tell. For some reason
> we've been getting more cases where garbage is getting written into the
> inode table. This is actually very troubling since you can lose a lot
> of data that way. I'm not sure why it's happening, though. But for
> some reason, there are cases where the Linux kernel is getting confused
> enough to scribble random data on an inode table. I've gotten enough
> questions about it such that I doubt it's a hardware problem. (Unless
> there's some common IDE or SCSI disk which scribbles random data on the
> disk during certain types of entertaining crashes or powerdown
> scenarios. Unlikely, but....)
My problems (as the original reporter of this bug) are originating from
a SCSI subsystem that is locking up (i.e. disk light locks on, nothing
can access the disk). Occasionaly, after a hard-reset, these garbage
files will show up.
Brian
( bcwhite@verisim.com )
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