Last night as my system booted, it was maximal mount count time. This in and of itself is probably a good thing, but when it got to hdb6 (my /usr, about 1.5G) fsck.ext2 died on signal 11 after fully checking the partition and reporting contiguousness, etc. It never marked the filesystem as having been checked (which caught me in a loop), so I'm guessing that's where the problem was. fsck gave a segmentation fault when I ran it from the root prompt. The system was fine other than this... there was no data loss or anything. (just had to mount the filesystems by hand and telinit 3) This problem was solved by removing the e2fsprogs errata for 6.1
Could you extract the e2fsck binary from the e2fsprogs-1.17, and try and help track down *where* it's crashing? This would be very helpful.
bash# fsck -C -c /dev/hdb6 Parallelizing fsck version 1.17 (26-Oct-1999) e2fsck 1.17, 26-Oct-1999 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09 Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information /dev/hdb6: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** /dev/hdb6: 54002/415744 files (5.6% non-contiguous), 900667/1657120 blocks Warning... fsck.ext2 for device /dev/hdb6 exited with signal 11. During the boot process (when it hits max mount count) it has the same failure and drops to a root prompt. It reports that this particular partition has reached the maximal mount count on the next boot also, and the following, and the following... The segfault only occurs when the filesystem is being scanned. After I used the older e2fsprogs (1.15) to scan and mark the filesystem as being scanned (which had no problems), at boot time the newer e2fsprogs just gave the usual "clean" messsage. The only time it segfaults is when it actually scans the disk or tries to fix errors. The filesystem mounts just fine when I tell it to mount from the prompt. The only oddity is that there are character and block devices in the lost+found directory of the partition that seem to have been created with random(?) modes. They can't be removed because the system responds with "No such device." I tried to remove them with debugfs also, but that was to no avail. Sorry. For now this is the best I can do. I can (hopefully) provide more detailed information later on. I'm not meaning to be a pain about it, it's just a matter of time constraints.
Ted fixed this in e2fsprogs-1.18. You can get packages from Raw Hide RSN; in the meantime, you can get a version to test from from people.redhat.com/notting/ext2/
Seems to have done the trick. Thanks much.