Question about EXT3 error messages in /var/log/messages

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 20:10, Mark Cuss wrote:
> Okay - so it is the major and minor numbers - thanks!  That means that md2
> is the culprit...
> 
> Does this mean that I have a drive failing in this raid or could the
> filesystem just need an fsck?

A drive failing should show up as IO errors in the logs, and the md
layer automatically switches out drives which give errors.  So it's not
a drive failing in the usual sense.

You've just got corrupt metadata on disk.  How it got there is pure
speculation --- the disk, controller, memory, CPU or software might be
at fault, and it's impossible to tell at this point.  But a fsck is
definitely recommended, as some types of on-disk corruption can spread,
corrupting other data as time goes on (in particular, if an indirect
block or bitmap gets corrupted then disk blocks belonging to one file
can get overwritten by being reallocated to another file.)  You don't
want to wait for that to happen!

Cheers,
 Stephen