Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 4 Jan 2009 04:23:42 +0100 | From | "Giangiacomo Mariotti" <> | Subject | Half-Disaster switching from ext3 to ext4 |
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I recently compiled and booted kernel v2.6.28 and decided to test ext4. After some formatting without problems, I decided to migrate my partitions from ext3 to ext4. I did the following to a non-important partition, just to test it : tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/name_of_partition ; fsck -pf /dev/name_of_partition. Everything went smoothly without any problem, so I did this to other partitions, in inverted order of importance. No problem at all. I used them, after having remounted them as ext4 file-systems, without any problem at all, no problems logged, nothing on dmesg, except for the normal messages. Then I had to power down the pc, so I manually umounted all the partitions(except for root obviously), I synced some times before doing that and then I shut down the pc with a "shutdown -h -P now". when I booted again the system, /dev/sda2(the partition with the most important data. Murphy's law really works!) failed to get mounted with a message saying something about corrupted groups(maybe, I don't remember exactly). Trying to do a fsck.ext4 -p /dev/sda2, I got something like : fsck.ext4 : Invalid argument while checking ext3 journal for /dev/sda2. So the fsck didn't help. Notice that nothing had happened to cause this problem, the system had worked normally before powering it down, even that partition didn't have any problem. So I did this : "mkfs.ext3 -c -c -n /dev/sda2"(the original command used to make the fs + -n) to find the backup superblocks and then I used one from them(randomly) to do "fsck.ext4 -p -b 'buckup-sb' /dev/sda2". Now fsck worked and it found again checksum errors in group descriptors, like when I switched the fs to ext4 and then it told me that the fs had errors so I had to do a manual fsck. I did that(the manual part is annoying and useless! How am I supposed to know what to do with what's on block *, or whatever? Just ask at the beginning if I want to do it manually or not, because most of the times I'd still say yes to all the questions. Waste of time!), I repaired the fs which at the end, after the manual cleaning resulted finally clean. After having remounted it, all files were gone! I was starting to use the sleuth kit, when I noticed that in the search+found directory there were almost all the files, but not all of them and in a rearrenged directory structure. Meanwhile all the other partitions which I switched from ext3 to ext4 had no problem at all, and even for /dev/sda2 no problem got logged, nor did the system switch off in a bad manner. So, what the hell happened?
Thanks, Giangiacomo
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