Thanks Ted, I'll go through that list and try swapping the original parts with spares that I have around home. I've run fsck since the problem started occurring and it _has_ found problems with the filesystem. I don't have the output on hand, but I can definitely make the filesystem go read-only again. When I do, I can send another mail with the attached output from the fsck. Maybe it will help to find the problem. I'll also try the LKML and Ubuntu forums. Thanks a lot! -Tim Theodore Tso wrote: > On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 04:38:12PM -0600, Tim Rupp wrote: >> I'm looking for advice/help in tracking down a problem with a new system >> I've purchased. >> >> I have a beige box server with a Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G motherboard. It >> has the nVidia MCP51 SATA controller with 3 250 gig Western Digital hard >> drives attached to it. >> >> It seems that when doing a considerable amount of file writing, the >> filesystem will become read-only. See attached dmesg output. > > According to the dmesg output, the filesystem is getting remounted > read-only because the kernel detected an inconsistency in the block > allocation bitmaps. Basically, a block that was in use and getting > freed (due to a file getting deleted) was found to be already marked > as not in use in the block bitmap. This is very dangerous, since a > corrupted block allocation bitmap can result in data loss when a block > gets used by two different files, and the contents of part of the > first file gets overwritten by the second. Hence, ext3 remounted the > filesystem read-only in order to protect your data from getting (more) > corrupted. > > The question then is why is this happening. If you run e2fsck and it > finds nothing wrong, then that means it was the in-core memory that > was corrupted --- so the data was correct on disk, but when it was > read from disk to memory, it had gotten corrupted somehow (another > good reason for ext3 to mark the filesystem read-only; to prevent the > corrupted data from getting written back to disk). > > In any case, given that you've checked the memory, it does rather seem > to narrow it down to either SATA cables, the disk drives, or the SATA > controller, roughly in that order of probability. The SATA cables are > probably the cheapest to try replacing first. I suppose there is a > chance that there it's a hardware device driver or kernel issue. You > might want to ask on LKML or on the Ubuntu support forums if there are > any known issues wit the nVidia SATA controller driver. > > Good luck, > > - Ted > _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
