IDE BUG REPORT: 2.5.45 killed my / partition

duron, kt133 motherboard, ide disks, new clean mandrake 9 install with ext3, running fine over several boots

Yesterday I compiled 2.5.45 after working around some build glitches, booted fine and ran it for several hours. I just turned on your basic generic IDE stuff and the VIA ide controllers, nothing fancy or (at least so I thought) dangerous.

Today I booted but it wouldn't let me log in as normal user (error message flashed too quickly for me to be able to read it, looked like it began with "critical") but I could log in as root so I did. I poked around and didn't see anything odd, so I went to reboot onto the mandrake kernel.

I boot up, and it gets to the point where it checks the root filesystem and it halts with an error:

Checking root filesystem
fsck.ext3/dev/hdb9:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:

     e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdb9 Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors? (Y/N) (beware, you can lose data)

A bit worried, I rebooted with the rescue disk and ran fsck.ext3, which found a bunch of errors that I told it to clean. Still on my rescue kernel/ramdisk I mounted the filesystem and tried listing a few files and everything was fine. I then rebooted and the boot-time fsck gave me the same error as above.

I thought that 2.5.45 wasn't supposed to have ide problems like this anymore...

Anyways, the only thing left that I can see is to re-install--anyone else have a better idea? I'll hold off on doing that for a few days in case someone wants more information on the system.

Any ideas why the rescue fsck passes but boot-time fails?

Thanks,

Chris

Chris Friesen                    | MailStop: 043/33/F10
Nortel Networks                  | work: (613) 765-0557
3500 Carling Avenue              | fax:  (613) 765-2986
Nepean, ON K2H 8E9 Canada        | email: [email protected]

Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn't boot was a conflict between the boot time checks and devfs (with devfs on /dev/hdb9 didn't exist...). If I turned off devfs loading at boot everything went okay.

However, there *were* those problems that fsck.ext3 found and I'm still kind of suspicious about them.

Chris

Chris Friesen                    | MailStop: 043/33/F10
Nortel Networks                  | work: (613) 765-0557
3500 Carling Avenue              | fax:  (613) 765-2986
Nepean, ON K2H 8E9 Canada        | email: [email protected]

Be sure not to tell us what hard drive you have, if you used dma or not, etc. These kinds of clues might help us understand what the problem is.

Usually, a boot log at the least is needed.

Jens Axboe