Hi, Here is Chris Mason's answer to this subject - he is one of the core ReiserFS developers... Bye, LenZ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lenz Grimmer SuSE GmbH mailto:grimmer@suse.de Schanzaeckerstr. 10 http://www.suse.de/~grimmer/ 90443 Nuernberg, Germany Parts is parts. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 10:52:49 -0500 From: Chris Mason <mason@suse.com> To: Lenz Grimmer <grimmer@suse.de> Subject: Re: [SLE] [admin@ragReiserfs and file destruction On Monday, November 05, 2001 03:08:55 PM +0100 Lenz Grimmer <grimmer@suse.de> wrote:

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Cliff Sarginson wrote:

...

A couple of times lately I have had files clobbered on me, on reiser fs's, with a most mysterious error.

After editing and saving lilo.conf on one occasion, I ran lilo -v, which gave some very peculiar error. On vi'ing the file, I got an error, which sadly I seem to have not kept (I know, not much use then) but it was something about a "pre-fetch" failure. And lo, lilo.conf did not exist anymore.

This is actually a very specific error, related to the new reiserfs quota patches, and a bug in vi. The filesystem keeps track of the number of blocks allocated to a file, and if this count is negative (the reiserfs bug) vi fails to open it, and also fails to keep it linked. You can find damaged files by doing an ls -las, the first column will have a huge number. Fixing a damaged file is just # make sure nobody is using file mv file file.1 cp file.1 file # check file to make sure it is correct rm file.1 It should only happen to files created or modified with suse 2.4.12-5 through suse 2.4.12-7. If other kernels were used, please let me know right away. -chris