FS corruption? bogus i_mode

[Rajaraman Ramanarayanan]

Thanks for the response. I am actually exposing the processor to neutron 
radiation which makes it vulnerable. Otherwise the processor and the 
system works fine once it is take out of the radiation. But this one time 
when the FS was corrupted i had to re-install the full root file system as 
it had corrupted the bin directory itself. But i have backed up the data 
(using dd command) to find out what exactly happened.

And it looks like the FS is corrupted such that many of the fields are 
corrupted (including size, file type, author etc).
Thanks again! Sincerely,
Rajaraman

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Christian Kujau wrote:

> 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
>