Subject: Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13
From: Nigel Cunningham <ncunningham@cyclades.com>
Reply-To: ncunningham@cyclades.com
To: sander@humilis.net
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
In-Reply-To: <20051004102834.GA16755@favonius>
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Organization: Cyclades
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Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 22:42:20 +1000
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Hi

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 20:28, Sander wrote:
> Rog?rio Brito wrote (ao):
> > On Sep 28 2005, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > > 3) Is the corruption only ever in memory, or seen on disk too?
> > 
> > I have noticed the problem mostly on disk. One strange situation was
> > when I was untarring a kernel tree (compressed with bzip2) and in the
> > middle of the extraction, bzip2 complained that the thing was
> > corrupted.
> > 
> > I removed what was extracted right away and tried again to extract the
> > tree (at this point, suspecting even that something in software had
> > problems). The problem with bzip2 occurred again. Then, I rebooted the
> > system an the problem magically went away.
> 
> That would mean the corruption existed in memory only. The kernel
> tarball got sucked into memory and got corrupted. On reboot, the tarball
> gets read in again, and this time no corruption. The on disk tarball was
> oke it seems.
> 
> If you run memtest86+ (latest version) for at least 24 hours it _should_
> find something.

Assuming that it really is a memory issue. Don't discount the
possibility of a kernel bug too quickly, especially when it apparently
worked fine in the past.

Just my 2c, feel free to discount anyway :)

Regards,

Nigel

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