[CLUE-Tech] ext2 file corruption

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Hey Jed,

> I happened upon this by accident, as I was cleaning some things out of my
> home directory. I openned a file in vi to see what it was, and found the
> contents of two files in it. Due to the divergent content, there's just no
> way that I would have appended them, and besides, the older content is
> below the newer. Of course, this now has me concerned.

Have you checked other files to see if this has happened with anything
else? I would guess that if you're experiencing some kind of file
corruption that it would affect more than one file. OTOH, if your disk
has developed a bad block, it might affect only one file.

Also, did you check to see if the other file still exists? 

You also didn't mention what kind of files these were or what
application you might be using them with -- perhaps it's not a
filesystem issue, but an application-level issue? 

> I had thought that ext2 was rock solid.

AFAIK, it is -- but there might be some kind of special condition which
causes problems. 

There have been filesystem corruption problems in the past, with the
2.0.x series of kernels, and (IIRC) 2.4.2. 

> I guess I'll be downloading the "SMARTS" package, and testing the hd.
> Other than that, any suggestions for tracking things down?

It might help to know what kernel version you're using, as well as the
IDE controller, and size/type of drive. Have you used hdparm on the
drive? There are several warnings about filesystem corruption in the
hdparm docs, though the potential corruption is usually described as
"massive" so I don't think it would corrupt only one file.

Best,
Zonker
--
"Bart, stop pestering Satan!" -- Marge Simpson