Re: 2.2.x corruption solved (Was Re: Statically linked 'tar')

Guest section DW (dwguest@win.tue.nl)
Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:47:51 +0200 (MET DST)


From: Martin Lucina <mato@nz.eds.com>

On Mon, Oct 11, 1999 at 11:29:21AM +0200, Bart Warmerdam wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 1999 at 10:55:26AM +1300, Martin Lucina wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 10, 1999 at 08:18:32PM +0200, Bart Warmerdam wrote:
> > > On Sun, Oct 10, 1999 at 12:15:19PM +1300, Martin Lucina wrote:
> >
> > The crash was quite bizzare also, I've been running kernel 2.2.9 for
> > ages now but when I did a 'make install' of XFree86 4.0 I just got
> > massive filesystem corruption. Doing a 'badblocks' check on /usr
> > afterwards didn't find anything so either I've got a weird hardware
> > problem or it's the kernel.
>
> The fs-corruption was teckled in 2.2.12 AFAIK. So this is a kernel thing
> if you'd ask me.

Actually, I've figured it out now. What happened was that when I was
installing the box, 'fdisk' somehow gave me a default end cylinder for the
last partition on the disklabel which was actually one cylinder past the
end of the disk. Hence the mysterious crash every time I did a make install
of XFree86 (since this causes lots of disk accesses).

I booted into NetBSD from floppy and their disklabel immediately pointed
out that 'partition f extends beyond end of unit'. So I rewrote the
disklabel, restored from backup and all seems fine now. The moral of this
story is, fdisk sucks and it needs to be rewritten to properly support
PC partitions/BSD disklabels/whatever.

mato

Yes - many selfish people complain loudly on all kinds of lists that there
are bugs in programs. However, they never write to the program maintainer.
Thus, the probability of anything being fixed is very small.

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