Hi, On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 10:18:37AM +0000, Ian Leonard wrote: > I doubt that this is actually an ext3 problem so I'm taking > a bit of a liberty, but... > > We have several machines that have two ext3 partitions > (/, /boot) and a large raw partition. Something happened that > destroyed both the ext3 partitions on all machines. > > I appears that the app writing to the raw partition had > a bug that caused it to write to negative block numbers > and that this wrote all over the disk. Shouldn't be able to happen --- negative offsets are rejected elsewhere in the kernel before raw devices can get to see them. The lseek/llseek syscalls return EINVAL if you try to set the offset to be negative for normal read/write syscalls, and the pread and pwrite syscalls also check for negative offsets before allowing things to proceed. > But I would have > thought that the writes would have been constrained > but the raw device. Yes, they should be. --Stephen
