Below a report on ext2 corruption I got a moment ago.
If noone else reports such things[*] then maybe my hardware
is not 100%, but this is a 1-month-old machine that has never
given any cause for suspicion. For the time being I suspect
the kernel, a vanilla 2.0.33.
So, I am afraid I have no idea whether this is an isolated occurrence.
There has been exactly one other such report (although unfortunately I
don't have the kernel version number) from Nick Holloway
(Nick.Holloway@alfie.demon.co.uk) on September 30, 1997.
My guess then, and it remains the same, since if there was a problem
with the kernel we should have seen a lot more complaints than just
these two isolated reports in over six months, was a hardware or DMA
glitch which caused data to get written to the wrong place.
It's possible that it could be a kernel problem, though, which is why I
do keep track and file such reports when people raise them, in order to
find patterns if they exist. So I'll file your report and see if anyone
else reports these problems (I track linux-kernel and
comp.os.linux.development.system looking for such bug reports.)
- Ted