[Bug 864344] Re: fsck -y leaves problems behind

[Theodore Ts'o]

I suppose I should change that message to be "programming bug in e2fsck,
checking a live file system, dodgy hardware/RAID array out of sync".

In this case, I'm going to put my money on the last one, and
specifically, that you have a hardware problem.   The errors that showed
up in the second fsck run are localized to a specific inode table block
that holds inodes 2330067, 2330069, 23300074, and 2330076.   In the
first fsck run, fsck complained about a programming error or that the
file system was mounted read-write.  Basically, that happens when the
value that fsck had cached changed out from under it.  This normally
happens when the file system is mount and it's being modified while fsck
runs, but it can also happen when the hardware is dodgy and returns one
set of values at one time, and another set of values at another.   (One
cause of this is a RAID1 array which is out of sync, so you get the
value from one side of the mirror, and then later you get the value on
the other side of the mirror.)

In this case, we specifically modified the inode table block containing
23300074 during the first check, only to have a different set of
complains on the second pass.  That indicates to me that the disk is
dodgy, and the contents which we wrote during the first pass was
different from the set of problems you had on the second pass.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/864344

Title:
  fsck -y leaves problems behind

Status in “e2fsprogs” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Fixing an ext4 file system  required multiple passes.  This is
  counter-intuitive in a program that will sometimes say something to
  the effect that "problems remain" but did not do so this time.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
  Package: e2fsprogs 1.41.14-1ubuntu3
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-11.50-generic-pae 2.6.38.8
  Uname: Linux 2.6.38-11-generic-pae i686
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Sat Oct  1 14:33:30 2011
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US:en
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: e2fsprogs
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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