e2fsck message "inode is too big"

[Andreas Dilger]

On Jul 25, 2008  12:55 +0200, thorsten.henrici at gfd.de wrote:
> after rebooting one of our systems one of the ext3 filesystems, that was 
> cleanly unmounted, fsck stopped the boot process due to critical errors in 
> that filesystem.
> 
> Running fsck -y manually returned, that one of the i-nodes is "too big" an 
> was truncated.
> After this about three million i-nodes were orphaned an moved to 
> lost+found.
> 
> # strings /sbin/e2fsck | grep -i 'too.*big'
> @i %i is too big. 
> @b #%B (%b) causes @d to be too big. 
> @b #%B (%b) causes file to be too big. 
> @b #%B (%b) causes symlink to be too big. 
> @h %i has a tree depth (%N) which is too big
> Ext2 file too big
> 
> shows the according output sting.

You need to provide the exact error message, not one of many possible
error messages.

> 1. What can cause this error

That depends on what the error is, exactly.



Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.