Messages in this thread | | | Subject | RE: Desktop Filesystem Benchmarks in 2.6.3 | From | Felipe Alfaro Solana <> | Date | Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:14:16 +0100 |
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On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 11:24, Mike Gigante wrote: > On Wednesday 03 March 2004 10:43, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote: > > But XFS easily breaks down due to media defects. Once ago I used XFS, > > but I lost all data on one of my volumes due to a bad block on my hard > > disk. XFS was unable to recover from the error, and the XFS recovery > > tools were unable to deal with the error. > > A single bad-block rendered the entire filesystem non-recoverable > for XFS? Sounds difficult to believe since there is redundancy such > as multiple copies of the superblock etc.
You should believe it... It was a combination of a power failure and some bad disk sectors. Maybe it was just a kernel bug, after all, as this happened with 2.5 kernels: during kernel bootup, the kernel invoked XFS recovery but it failed due to media errors.
> I can believe you lost *some* data, but "lost all my data"??? -- I > believe that you'd have to had had *considerably* more than > "a bad block" :-)
It was exactly one disk block, at least that's what the low-level HDD diagnostic program for my IBM/Hitachi laptop drive told me. In fact, the HDD diagnostic was able to recover the media defects.
That could have been one of those very improbable cases, but I lost the entire volume. Neither the kernel nor XFS tools were able to recover the XFS volume. However, I must say that I didn't try every single known way of performing the recovery, but recovery with ext2/3 is pretty straightforward.
As I said, it could have been a kernel bug, or maybe I simply didn't understand the implications of recovery, but xfs_repair was totally unable to fix the problem. It instructed me to use "dd" to move the volume to a healthy disk and retry the operation, but it was not easy to do that as I explained before.
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