Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 215808
e2fsprogs looping on inode 8
Last modified: 2015-01-07 19:15:08 EST
Description of problem: fsck seems to think every single block belongs to inode 8. Illegal block #219444 (2338623074) in inode 8. CLEARED. Illegal block #219445 (2340324616) in inode 8. CLEARED. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): e2fsprogs-1.35-12.4.EL4.x86_64 How reproducible: Extremely difficult Additional info: One of our customers had a corrupted filesystem on software RAID. They ran fsck on the file system and it sat for 60 hours on inode 8 complaining about each consecutive block. At first they were using e2fsprogs-1.35-12.3.EL4.x86_64 but they installed e2fsprogs-1.35-12.4.EL4.x86_64 and tried again and they got the same errors with inode 8. There are reports on the internet that this bug was fixed in version 1.36. http://kangry.com/topics/viewcomment.php?index=221 https://listman.redhat.com/archives/ext3-users/2005-February/msg00048.html
Dan, I don't think I'll be able to make progress on this one due to lack of information and the age of the bug. I apologize for the very late initial reply, but I've recently been going through a backlog of e2fsprogs bugs that were somewhat recently assigned to me. The redhat.com ext3-users list message above doesn't necessarily look like the same situation; in that case e2fsck seemed to be looping. In your case, it appears that the list of blocks for the journal inode (8) is bad. It may in fact be a very corrupt filesystem - ideally I'd expect it to give up before 60 hours go by, based on some hunch that this journal inode is beyond hope. However, without knowing the details of what was wrong with your fileystem, it'd be tough to fix. In the future, creating an e2image of the filesystem would allow for further analysis. If there is any more information you can provide which may help get to the root cause of, or solution to, this bug - please feel free to reopen. Thanks, -Eric