From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: When I try to write LILO into Linux partition, kernel says 'Unexpected dirty buffer encountered at do_get_write_access:597 (03:06 blocknr 0)'. However, everything works after this. My platform is Dell Latitude, 20GB disk (Linux partition is somewhere around 12GB), stock RH kernel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.lilo -v 2. 3. Actual Results: Error (warning?) message, but everything works fine after this. Expected Results: No message. Additional info: I've found this message in ext3 journalling daemon sources. I think that ext3 and LILO have some misunderstanding in this area...
That warning occurs when some external program modifies a block that is under ext3 control. In this case it's probably because you're running LILO with the boot sector one one of your partitions, rather than on the MBR of the disk. There's just no way around it --- if you do this, LILO ends up modifying one of the filesystem blocks which contains critical fs metadata (the superblock in this case). Of course, a journaling filesystem's correctness depends utterly on it getting the write order on disk exactly correct, and finding buffers unexpectedly dirty can indicate that that has gone wrong, which would be a potentially-data-corrupting error. So ext3 has the choice of warning about this or ignoring it. Given the potentially severe result of any ext3 bug which gets the write order wrong, it's better to leave the warning present, but the side-effect is that this particular LILO operation will result in a warning if you use it on an active, live filesystem.