the worst scenario of ext3 after abnormal powerdown

[Pengcheng Zou]

Hi,

I have seen and heard many cases of ext3 corrupted after abnormal
powerdown (e.g. missing all the files in one directory). yes, UPS
should help, but wonder what kind of worst scenario will ext3 present
after powerdown.

messed up meta data has been seen in many cases, for example, the
in-direct block of one inode  contains garbage, which causes the
automatic fsck failed to work and user has to repair the file system
manually (and always result in some missing files). should I blame
ext3 for it? or should I just turn off the disk write cache?

it seems Windows NTFS has less such problem than ext3, and no matter
it's the problem of ext3 or mis-configured hardware, this behavior is
really causes lots of people to doubt the stability of Linux file
system.

thanks,
  -- Pengcheng