fsck shortcomings

[Michael Nottebrock]

Scott Long wrote:

> Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> 
>> I recently had a filesystem go bad on me in such a way that it was 
>> recognized way bigger than it actually was, causing fsck to fail while 
>> trying to allocate and equally astronomic amount of memory (and my 
>> machine already had 1 Gig of mem + 2 Gig swap available).
>> I just newfs'd and I'm now in the process of restoring data, however, 
>> I googled a bit on this and it seems that this kind of fs corruption 
>> is occurring quite often, in particular due to power failures.
> 
> 
> Yes, very troubling.  You said that the alternate superblocks didn't
> help?

Yes, although that might have been bad luck - I didn't realise something was 
wrong with the fs right away.

Since I had background fsck enabled, the filesystem got mounted anyway, but 
the system hung at executing dhclient, so I fiddled around with disabling 
acpi/apic & other stuff, assuming that something was wrong with the NIC or the 
NIC driver... I guess the alternate superblock might have worked if I had 
recognized the problem at once and tried fsck_ffs -b right away instead of 
mounting the bad fs over and over while trying to fix the NIC.

-- 
    ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
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