From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Description of problem: I created a backup of a directory that had one file that was not completely readable (IO error from the block device). The size of the files was ~4GB. I did tar cvf /mnt/elsewhere/archive.tar /mnt/msdos tar said: (...) /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1002 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1003 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1004 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1005 tar: /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1006: File shrank by 692300 bytes; padding with zeros /mnt/msdos/Program Files/dir2/file2000 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/dir2/file2001 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/dir2/file2002 /mnt/msdos/Program Files/dir2/file2003 (...) and continued til the end listing all the files (afaik). The archive.tar ended up at around 4GB (about right). Now tar tf archive.tar only lists files up until /mnt/msdos/Program Files/file1006 - NOTHING after it. tar vzf also doesn't extract more than 600MB (ends where file1006 appears). " tar x" or "tar t" goive no error, though. Unfortunaly, I already wiped the erraneous input file system (falsely trusting the tar backup I had), so I can't retest. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tar-1.15.1-10.FC4 How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. "tar c" on a file system with an unreadable file. 2. 3. Actual Results: Missing everything after the unreadable file Expected Results: Zero padded unreadable file; complete archive otherwise Additional info:
I got a response from bug-tar suggesting that this is ficed in newest snapshots. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2005-11/ I was able to salvage a similarily damaged (in fact, the same) fs from a backup. This is a mildly (fixable by fsck.vfat) fat fs corrupted by a power interrupt - only few files give IO error. I downloaded and built tar-1.15.2-20050902 from ftp://download.gnu.org.ua/pub/alpha/tar. I verified that tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1 from tar-1.15.1-10.FC4 reproducibly exhibits this bug whereas tar (GNU tar) 1.15.2 from tar-1.15.2-20050902.tar.bz does not.
I confirmed that tar-1.15.1-11 from rawhide fixes this with my test case.