fsck weirdness

[John Limpert]

I recently ran into a bunch of problems with fsck and my news
filesystem.  It started out with the filesystem getting really
messed up with multiply allocated disk blocks.  After many iterations
of running fsck most of the problems were fixed.  One problem
remains, fsck seems to get confused about the contents of the
free list.  If I run a normal fsck, i.e. 'fsck /dev/rdsk/0s3', fsck
says there are 100 DUP blocks in the free list, offers to rebuild
the free list and comes up with a bogus number of free blocks
on the filesystem.  Running 'fsck -f /dev/rdsk/0s3' seems to
work correctly and build a good free list.  This only started to
happen recently.  When I setup the hard disk configuration on my
system I was careful to keep partitions smaller than 130000 blocks,
however the news partition was mkfs'd with many more inodes than
the default value.  My guess is that the large number of active inodes
is overflowing some table in fsck and corrupting other data.
This all sounds like some problems that had been previously reported
on comp.unix.microport.  Am I on the right track?

-- 
John A. Limpert
UUCP:	johnl at n3dmc.UUCP, johnl at n3dmc.UU.NET, uunet!n3dmc!johnl