fsck weirdness

[Randy Jarrett WA4MEI]

In article <637 at n3dmc.UU.NET> johnl at n3dmc.UU.NET (John Limpert) writes:
  ++
  ++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


I think that you will find that fsck on microport has that problem with any
filesystem that is greater than ~80000 blocks.  This is the size that I had
some problems with and I wouldn't be supprised if it turned out that the
magic number was something in the area of 64000.  Once the problem starts
everytime you run fsck you compound the problem.  I let fsck run to the point
that it asks if I want to rebuild the free chain and then answer no. I then
run it with the -f option to let it straighten everything up.


-- 
Randy Jarrett  WA4MEI 
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