Ext3 Journal corruption on hitachi deskstars

[greg.martin at ddos.com]

Had another one fail today so I was able to tarball the /var directory this 
is the warning that comes from dmesg: 

EXT2-fs warning (device hda3): ext2_fill_super: mounting ext3 filesystem as 
ext2
EXT2-fs warning: mounting fs with errors, running e2fsck is recommended 

nothing much there... the console during the crash was flooding with this 
error: 

EXT-fs error (device ide(3,3)) in start)transation: Journal has aborted 

not much there... I noticed more google references to problems with Hitachi 
drives, the only thing thats common on these systems that are having the 
failures are the drive types and that they are all running some Redhat 
derivative fedora core 1, RHEL or Centos.  Kernel is 2.4.24, some tech's 
claim you can wget flood apache for a few hours at 100mbps and cause this 
filesystem crash...  Maybe a bug in the IDE driver?  I just figured if I 
mentioned ext3 crash and hitachi in the same sentance someone would come 
back with a kernel patch for me but im never that lucky. 

Regards, 

Greg 


Stephen C. Tweedie writes: 

> Hi, 
> 
> On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 20:38, greg.martin at ddos.com wrote:
>> I recently came across an enormous cluster of x86 clone machines running 
>> fedora core 1 (2.4.24) which have typically all intel or amd have VIA IDE 
>> chipsets.  
>> 
>> They frequently experience corrupted journals rendering the ext3 partition 
>> in read-only mode.
> 
> When ext3 first takes a filesystem offline/readonly, it always logs an
> initial message explaining why it's doing so.  You'll need to capture
> that log message. 
> 
> Obviously, if it's the filesystem containing /var/ that went readonly,
> then /var/log/messages won't contain the information; but "dmesg" may,
> and you can set up serial or network console to capture it. 
> 
> --Stephen 
> 
>