Re: Major problems

[Theodore Tso <tytso mit edu>]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 08:21:11PM -0600, Skylar Thompson wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 09:37:44PM +0000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> No, nothing like that. Whenever I tried accessing an affected file, I would
> get something like this:
> 
> foo: Input/output error.

That *is* an EIO error reported to the application (translated into
English, that's all).  This generally, but not always, means hardware
problems.

> I never got errors of any kind to the console, just to stderr. This is why
> I suspect it might be a filesystem problem, rather than a physical disk
> problem. 

Given that you listed files on your root filesystem getting messed up,
I wonder if syslog/klogd got toasted in such a way that they're still
running (and thus intercepting the kernel console messages) but it's
completely screwed up (so you don't see any kernel messags).

Try booting for a rescue floppy, and then run badblocks on the disk.
If you see media errors reported in that case, then you'll know what's
up.

						- Ted