On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
Here is the text of a message I sent to the maintainter of the ext2fs filesystem. I think it would be of interest to this group, especially if anyone here has had a similar experience.
1. Summary: Ext2fx implosion when RAM added
2. Description: My computer is a Pentium II with a Tyan S1590 Trinity 100AT motherboard. I am running SuSE Linux 6.2 with the 2.2.14 kernel. I had 64MB of SIMM memory installed. Recently I installed an additional 64MB in the form of a single (Kingston PC100) DIMM module, bringing the total memory to 132MB. When I rebooted the computer, one of my Linux filesystems generated massive fsck errors, apparently related to a bad superblock. properly.
My observation is that the error seems to be caused by the conjunction of three circumstances: a large (3GB) partition, a large RAM installation (132MB), and the use of a significant portion of the available space within the partition. It is triggered either by the shutdown procedure or the bootup procedure, but I don't know which.
I've got a similar setup with no problems. I originally had 64MB and added 64MB (doesn't that add up to 128MB? And 128MB isn't all that much memory these days), and I've got a 3.25GB /usr partitition in an extended partition which is almost full. The only difference is my /usr partition is in an extended partition with ID 5, not f, and I don't have an AST Windows swapfile partition (what is that anyway?) or any Windows partitions in the extended partition, just one a 1 gig primary FAT16 partition at the beginning of the drive.
Disk /dev/hdc: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1027 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdc1 1 64 514048+ 18 AST Windows swapfile
/dev/hdc2 65 1027 7735297+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hdc5 65 447 3076416 83 Linux /dev/hdc6 448 511 514048+ e Win95 FAT16 (LBA) /dev/hdc7 512 766 2048256 b Win95 FAT32
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