init_special_inode: bogus i_mode

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Tue Sep 30 14:53:58 UTC 2008


Albert Sellarès wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a server running Redhat 5 that have attached a SAN of 5TB. The
> SAN filesystem is formated with ext3.

I suppose you mean RHEL5?

> One month ago, the kernel was started to send this error messages:
> 
> init_special_inode: bogus i_mode (56333)
<snip>
> init_special_inode: bogus i_mode (136237)
> 
> Every day, kernel prints out one or two lines like these.
> 
> I haven't found nothing in the list archives, and searching in google I
> found that it could be that the filesystem is corrupted.
> 
> On my last step to know what has happening in the filesystem, I have
> look the kernel source code. Now I really think that it is an error, but
> I'm not sure what it means.
> 
> Can anybody tell me what exactly means this message?

For an inode which is not recognized as a regular file, directory, or
link when it is read, init_special_inode is called.

At that point, if it's not a char, block, fifo, or socket, you get this
error.  Basically it doesn't know what this thing is.  It'd be nice if
it printed the inode number as well, to make it easier to find.

I'd probably suggest fsck at this point, run it with -n first if you
want to see what it *would* do, just to be safe.

-Eric




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