FS corruption? bogus i_mode

[Christian Kujau]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rajaraman Ramanarayanan wrote:
> I am doing some testing on a PXA270 based processor (on a single board 
> computer) which makes the processor vulnerable to bit flips. One
> such bit flips seems to have corrupted the file system.

I don't know these PXA270 processors but your comment reads as if the 
processor is "prone to bit-flips by design", which I can't believe...so, 
I guess the cpu broke somehow, was overheated or sth.?

If so, that's like having faulty memory or faulty data-paths in 
general (bus errors, bad cabling, too hot processors, etc...). And kinds 
of errors can be caused by this and the fs can't do much about it 
because the code in the fs-driver (any fs) isn't executed in the way it is 
meant to.

> segrith.cse.psu.edu 66% du -khs bin
> 426G    bin
> segrith.cse.psu.edu 67% ll
> total 446404348
> cr-Sr-S--- 8240 959265076 876099129 32, 50 Oct  2  1997 bin

so, the system thinks /bin is a 426 GB character device on a 4GB 
filesystem?

you could run a recent version of e2fsck and see what can be repaired 
but I'd suggest to get a stable hardware platform and playback your 
backups :(

Christian.
-- 
BOFH excuse #54:

Evil dogs hypnotised the night shift