gentoo-sources 2.4.19-r10 reiserfs file corruption ?

c_kuzmanic · Last edited by c_kuzmanic on Thu Dec 19, 2002 11:43 pm; edited 4 times in total

Just thought I'd write this post to give people fair warning about problems with reiserfs on gentoo-sources 2.4.19-r9/10 .

My probs started when I started Pan and discovered that all my preferences were lost, mysteriously my .pan directory had suddenly vanished. The disc with my home directory uses reiserfs. 'No problem' , I thought - thats what backups are for...

I use one dedicated ide drive as a backup drive, that drive uses reiserfs. Since I use rdiff-backup to make backups via cron, I typed '$rdiff-backup -1D /backup/home.master/.pan /home/master/.pan.restored ' . I was really baffled to see that after typing that command (which I had used successfully before) absolutely nothing seemed to happen, no disc activity, no error messages, nothing. So I fired up an xterm and cd'ed into the affected backup directory. And here is where it gets very interesting: Once I cd'ed into the /back/home.master directory, the xterm mysteriously froze, and I had to shut it down. I then tried different methods to access that directory, but all of them ended with the console mysteriously stopping to respond when trying to access that directory. Next step was reiserfsck /dev/hde . Same problem there, reiserfsck froze without any error messages or further feedback. Right then, fired up konqueror navigated to that directory - konqueror frooze! I got really frustrated at that point, since even a puny '$du /backup' showed the same mystifying behaviour, the console issuing the command simply stopped and froze, $cp , $mv, $rm -f -nothing would work.. Read/Write permissions were all in order, even though I couldn't stat the directory to make sure.. For some reason that partition behaved much like a black hole, matter goes in but nothing ever goes out. After messing around with it for about half an hour more and trying every trick in my book, I admitted defeat and thought an '$ reiserfsck --rebuild-tree --scan-whole-partition' would help, but - same thing, after issuing that command the console just stopped responding, for some reason that drive remained untouchable.. So I shut down my machine and inspected my hardware, everything checked out fine as expected - no hardware related problems could have caused this. Since I also had tape-backups of the content on the affected drive, I decided to nuke it with fdisk (which worked:) reformat the drive and start new, but first I installed the vanilla-sources.
Right now everything seems to work fine but I guess I'll only know for sure after a much longer period of time. Did anybody else have any probs like this ?

P.S.:
I forgot to mention that my home partition also uses reiserfs, which is probably why I lost that .pan directory in the first place. What the .pan directory and the 'black hole' backup directory have in common is a) reiserfs and b) they both had to handle very many small and larger files that would increase incrementally in size over a very short period of time (downloading from newsgroups using pan, and doing incremental backups with rdiff).

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 10:44 pm Post subject:

I just noticed there's also a bug report on the issue:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9459

zatalian · Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2002 11:24 am Post subject:

I lost my reiserfs partition while using this gentoo kernel too.
I still don't know if it was a reiserfs bug or not.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=21444

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2002 11:34 am Post subject: