Many orphaned inodes after resize2fs

[Patrik Horník]

Hello,

yesterday I experienced following problem with my ext3 filesystem:

- I had ext3 filesystem of the size of a few TB with journal. I correctly
unmounted it and it was marked clean.

- I then ran fsck.etx3 -f on it and it did not find any problem.

- After increasing size of its LVM volume by 1.5 TB I resized the
filesystem by resize2fs lvm_volume and it finished without problem.

- But fsck.ext3 -f immediately after that showed "Inodes that were part of
a corrupted orphan linked list found." and many thousands of "Inode XXX was
part of the orphaned inode list." I did not accepted fix. According to
debugfs all the inodes I check from these reported orphaned inodes (I
checked only some from beginning of list of errors) have size 0.

- When I mount the fs read only the data I was able to check seem OK. (But
I am unable to check everything.)

- I created LVM snapshot and repaired the fs on it with fsck.ext3. After
that there we no files in lost+found. Does it mean that all that orphaned
inodes have size 0? Or when the fsck does not create files in lost+found?

- I am checking the data against various backups but I will not be able to
check everything and some less important data dont have backup. So I would
like to know in what state the fs is and what are best next steps.

- Right now I am planning to use current LVM snapshot as test run and
discard it after data check. Original fs is in the state just after
resize2fs, fsck was run on it after that but I did not accepted any fix and
cancelled the check. I then plan to create backup snapshot, fsck original
fs / LVM volume, check once again against backups and go with it. But this
will not tell me status of all my data and the fs and if it is secure to
use it. Another problem is all operations take long hours.

- I have also some technical specific questions. Orphan inode is valid
inode not found in any directory, right? What exactly is CORRUPTED orphan
linked list? What can cause such problem? Is it known problem? How can
orphaned inodes and corrupted orphan linked list can be created by
resize2fs or why was it not detected by fsck.ext3 before that? Can it be
serious and can it be symptom of some data loss? Can fixing it by fsck.ext3
corrupt other data which are OK now, when I mount the fs read-only?

- The platform used was latest stable Debian with
kernel linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 version 3.2.46-1+deb7u1
and e2fsprogs 1.42.5-1.1. After the incident I started
using linux-image-3.13-1-amd64 version 3.13.7-1 (from the point of
snapshot's creation and running fsck for real on snapshot) and thinking
about going to e2fsprogs 1.42.9 from sources.

Thank you very much.

Patrik
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