FSCK of corrupted ext3 filesystem

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Sat Aug 27 17:07:25 UTC 2005


On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 01:16:34PM +0100, Matt Bernstein wrote:
> On Aug 25 Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> 
> >Which version of e2fsprogs?  There were some serious algorithmic
> >inefficiencies in some really old versions that could explain this sort
> >of thing.
> 
> e2fsprogs-1.37-4 from Fedora Core 4 x86_64.
> 
> On Aug 25 Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> >What sort of messages was e2fsck printing beforehand?
> 
> Nothing I found overly unusual. A few errors in pass 1; it reached the 
> "checking directory structure" pass (pass 2 IIRC) and then nothing.
> 
> I guess at this point I should confess that the filesystem had (as now 
> I've trashed it again with mkfs) of the order of hundreds of millions of 
> directory entries, and tens of millions of inodes.

All in one directory?  How may directory entries in a single directory
inode, would you estimate?  

If this happens again, where you see no activity for more than say an
hour (either on the console or on the disk drive), please consider
forcing a core dump and sending me the dump along with the e2fsck
binary and the distribution/rpm version of e2fsprogs on the system.  

I'd be very much interestedin getting to the bototm of this if it
happens again.

Regards,

						- Ted




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