ext2 problems in 2.4

Ok, the problem appears to have been fixed. I venture the bug is likely in the e2fs tools for the simple reason that on the last time I took the machine down for maintenance, I ran e2fsck five times and got different results for the first three runs. Now before everyone flys off the handle with their favorite flamethrower, the server was in single user mode with nothing else running but the kernel threads. There weren't any processes left and lsof was also clean. I have also been forcing fsck on boot every time.

The machine has been up for four days now without any errors and no unaccounted for disk space.

David

If you have a problem like this in the future, please download and compile the latest e2fsprogs (1.23 WIP 9-Aug-2001), and use the command "e2image -r /dev/xxx raw-image-file". This will create a raw image file which is a sparse file containing only the filesystem metadata. Try running fsck on that, and see if you are continuing to get differing results between runs. If so, then you've isolated away from it being a hardware problem. Then, if you don't mind letting me see the directory names/hierarchy in your filesystem, bzip2 the resulting filesystem and send it to me, along with an indication of the size of the filesystem.

That will allow me to debug the problem at my end, without my needing to see any of your file data, as well as making the compressed filesystem image small enough that it should be feasible to ship it over the net.

Many thanks,

- Ted