Arch Linux

Peibol

Member

From: Madrid - España

Registered: 2006-09-07

Posts: 18

hw problems or ext3 bug?

Hi,

This message is posted in "Workstation User" and "Kernel and HW issues" because I'm not sure what the problem is.

I'm having a problem with ext3 partition and I'm not sure if it's a bug o what. It has happened 3 times yesterday (Sunday), before I switched off the computer at night.

Situation
* A computer (no laptop) with 2 HD (hda and hdd) and a few partitions in each disk.
* Hdd has 1 ext3 and 2 xfs.
* Hda has 1 swap (hda1), 2 ext3 and 1 xfs. The two ext3 are "/" (hda5) and /home (hda6). The rests of directories /var /tmp and so are part of "/", on hda5.
* It's a coincidence (or not) but last weekend I made a "pacman –Sy; pacman –Su", and two of the packages updated were "filesystem" and "kernel". The pacman repositories I have configured are "current" and "extra".

The problem
After a few hours working the console shows the following messages:

   journal_bmap: journal block not found at offset 25312 on hda5
   Aborting journal on device hda5.
   ext3_abort called.
   EXT3-fs error (device hda5): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
   Remounting filesystem read-only

From that point, a lot of syslog-ng errors because of read-only filesystem, and also erros from other programs (xorg, kde, etc).
Obviously nothing works properly. In hda5 is mounted "/", including /var and /tmp and it's read-only.
The offset referred (25312) is different each time it happened.

First idea
Could it be the hw, physical error? It could, but when I've had problems with hw, there were lots of messages like "seek error", "read error sector ##", "seek complete error", etc.
But in this situation there aren't. And the error is always in hda5, never in hda6 (also ext3) not hda7 (xfs). So I doubt it's a hw problem.
Why not hda6? My opinion, hda5, root fs, is heavily used compared to hda6 (/home). The third time I got the error, I didn't log into any session. Only the OS and services.

Could it be a bug, related to ext3, after the last upgrade?

---

Peibol

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: hw problems or ext3 bug?

Please don't cross-post:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=25392

Locking.