Re: Major problems

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct redhat com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 12:13:44PM -0600, Skylar Thompson wrote:
> I am having major problems on one of my file-servers. I have the root
> filesystem on an Ext3 software RAID 1 between four SCSI drives. It had been
> running for about two months without problems, but today I found it was
> having some trouble with unlinked inodes and I/O errors on certain files. I
> took it down to single-user mode, and ran fsck on it. That operation mixed
> up files like /etc/hosts with /etc/rc.sysinit, and vice versa. I
> straightened those out, and ran fsck again. That happened to trash such
> files as /etc/raidtab and /etc/passwd and caused I/O errors so that I could
> not straighten it out.  Running fsck again made the problem worse by making
> /etc/rc.sysinit unaccessible, and preventing me from booting up at all. I don't have helpful snippets from the error log since I was on a serial
> terminal and was incapable of paging up. I'm glad I finally got the
> terminal up to 38400 b/s though....

There's not enough information here for us to have any hope of
diagnosing it accurately.  What sort of IO errors were you getting?
-EIO errors returned to the application, or IO errors from device
drivers in the kernel console?

Cheers,
 Stephen