Ext3 errors with 2.4.18

Hi,

With Linux 2.4.18, I'm getting multiple of the following error:

EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,2)): ext3_readdir: bad entry in directory #1966094:
rec_len % 4 != 0 - offset=0, inode=3180611420, rec_len=53134, name_len=138

Can someone decipher this?

Regards,
-Udo.

Can you post the surrounding lines from dmesg? Many times there is another error that tells much more than the one you just posted...

There are no surrounding lines related to this error.

-Udo.

That's random junk. Heaven knows. It could have come from anywhere in the kernel. Including ext3, of course.

When you see this sort of thing you should immediately take the machine down, because the corruption could be only in-memory. The longer the machine stays up, the better the chance that the corruption will go to disk.

And with ext3, the best way to take the machine down is to pull the power plug. Normal shutdown tools will sync the disks, which you don't want to happen.

Then reboot with `init=/bin/sh' and force a fsck against all filesystems.

-

Hi,

I experienced the same problem with ext3 + 2.4.18 on a RAID-1. Out of nowhere the following error popped up in the syslog, no other surrounding error messages. The fs was mounted read-only automatically. After reboot and fsck there were /a lot/ of errors on the disk. Virtually all errors fsck knows I think. :) After fsck ran multiple times on the disk, lost+found was filled with stuff from all accross the disk, but other than that the fs seems to have survived it.

May 14 01:24:41 kianga kernel: EXT3-fs error (device md(9,0)): ext3_readdir: 
bad entry in directory
#2142115: rec_len %% 4 != 0 - offset=0, inode=4186379891, rec_len=16755, 
name_len=219
May 14 01:24:51 kianga last message repeated 2 times

Regards,
Oliver

Oliver Feiler  <kiza@(gmx.net|lionking.org|claws-and-paws.com|spot.dtip.de)> /
http://www.lionking.org/~kiza/      (http://spot.dtip.de/)                  /
___________________________________________________________________________/

There have been several reports of strange ext3 errors when running on MD RAID. I don't know if anyone is looking into this yet.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/