Re: ext2 problems on fast-wide SCSI-2

Grant R. Guenther (root@baroque.co.uk)
Tue, 07 May 1996 21:20:30 +0200


You might want to check if your using the ext2fs 0.5b <- 'b' not 'a'

I had problems with my 4Gb (narrow) SCSI drive in the begining until
someone clued me into the 'sub' version of the ext2 drivers.
Check fsck, mkfs, and fdisk ( I think).

My 4Gb disk+ HP dat <-> Adaptec 2940 works fine.

Good luck,
Robert.

root wrote:
>
> I'm sending this to both linux-kernel and linux-scsi, as it would seem
> both are potentially appropriate.
>
> I've been trying to bring up a new, fairly high-performance machine
> for use as a web/mail/whatever server.
>
> It's a P150 (Tyan Tempest II) with 64MB RAM, a DPT PM2124W Fast/Wide
> SCSI-2 controller, a Fujitsu M2934QA 4GB F/W SCSI-2 drive that's been
> partitioned to have sda1 as a 300-odd MB root partition and sda4 as a
> 32MB swap partition, and a 3c595 Ethercard.
>
> All the termination on the SCSI BUS seems to be in order, and the
> cable length seems OK, with appropriate spacing in between
> connections.
>
> I have had, unfortunately, nothing but problems, running a variety of
> kernels from 1.3.74 on. I initially chalked them up to the known
> fragility of really-fast SCSI systems, but I've been trying to run
> 1.3.97, which is supposed to be much more reliable, and still have
> major problems.
>
> I messages I see often looks like (reformatted):
>
> May 3 10:29:06 vineland kernel: free_one_pmd: bad directory entry
> 00400000
>
> sometimes in clusters of as many as 14 (though the directory entry
> number varies, it's always 00200000, 00400000 or 00800000).
>
> egrepping through the sources, I get the impression that this means
> things aren't going as expected in swap space, but I don't pretend to
> be a kernel hacker, so that is as sophisticated as my analysis gets.
>
> The message that I saw that got me to write this email (reformatted):
>
> EXT2-fs error (device 08:01): ext2_find_entry: bad entry in directory
> #101620: inode out of bounds - offset=12 inode=4194306, rec_len=12,
> name_len=2
>
> It was repeated 7 times in quick succession. All I was doing was
> logging in, so it wouldn't seem to be load related. It didn't hang
> the machine.
>
> I've also had lockups and panics and such, but, as I said, I was
> running kernels that were more-or-less known to have problems with
> fast SCSI subsystems (or so I had gathered from these mailing lists),
> so I figured I'd not clutter things up and just wait for the probems,
> which seemed fairly well understood, to be resolved.
>
> Now, of course, that it seems that these aren't the same problems as
> before, I will endeavour to report them.
>
> I'm open to any suggestions---I kind of went out on a limb suggesting
> a Linux box rather than a SS20, and I must admit I'm feeling sort of
> foolish right now. Fortunately, I'm not under terrifically heavy
> deadline pressure to get this deployed.
>
> Mike.
> --
> "Don't let me make you unhappy by failing to be contrary enough...."

-- 
----------------------------------------------
Robert O'Kane
OTHERSPACE
Founding Member and Linker

URL : http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~okane email: okane@em.uni-frankfurt.de ----------------------------------------------