From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18 alpha) Description of problem: I *had* an ext2 file system on an alpha running 7.1 w/ a 2.4.18 kernel. On a reboot where it needed to check the filesystem, it corrupted the system worse, removing most files. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install 2.4.18 kernel on RedHat 7.1 2.Boot system with 2.4.18 kernel 3.Run fsck on a large, unclean filesystem (I avoid doing this, the consequences are pretty dire. I boot the canned kernel, which stays alive long enough to fsck the system and do a clean shut down.) Actual Results: Many error messages about partial block reads, many more errors then actually present, and many lost files as a result. Expected Results: Running the same fsck under the 2.4.9 kernel binary from the updates area seems safe and correct. Unfortunately, those kernels are unstable on my PC164/srm machine. Additional info: The e2fsprogs is from the RedHat 7.1 CD. The kernel is 2.4.18 from the pristine sources. The system is otherwise (running this kernel) stable, with no trouble accessing the files. The file systems are not very large, a couple gig. This problem has been mentioned (and experienced) by others on the axp-list mailing list.
e2fsprogs 1.27 has quite a few fixes for alpha/ia64. You might want to upgrade to this version and see if that cures e2fsck problems. If the kernel is not working on your machine, please open a bug-report against the kernel for this. Thanks a lot, Florian La Roche