Help on ext3 file system corruption issue

[Theodore Tso]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 02:41:42AM +0200, Miernik wrote:
> Isn't CF always wear-levelled internally, so it shouln't matter, and the
> internal compact flash controller will take care not to write to the
> same physical chip all the time?

Cards do seem to have some differences in quality and quality of their
wear levelling algorithms (some of which I believe are patented, but
I'm not an expert in this area).

> I wonder, because I had recently had two CF cards used as root sidk in a
> CF-ICE adapter go bad, one with unrecoverable bad sectors (ext3 couldn't
> be used on it, it was only 32 sectors = 16 kB, but still I couldn't use
> the card at all, because these sectors where coming back over and over
> again, like if the CF was remapping there somewhere else, and ext3 not
> knowing about that jumed upon them again, and so on, very strange). Then
> a second card got completely destroyed in just couple of months standard
> desktop usage as root filesystem. I didn't use swap on any of the cards,
> /home was also somewhere else, no really often changing data.

Did you mount the filesystems with the noatime mount option?  If not,
then there was probably a huge amount of changes to the CF caused by
the last access time getting updated.

Regards,

							- Ted