On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 02:34:10PM +0800, Chen Huan wrote: > Hi, All. > > During a recent read-only checking of an corrupted ext3 file system, > I found a strange behaviour of e2fsck: when an inode has an invalid > indirect block number, e2fsck aborts with the following message: > > e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006) > Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes > Inode 12 has illegal block(s). Clear? no > > Illegal block #-1 (4294967295) in inode 12. IGNORED. > Error while iterating over blocks in inode 12: Illegal indirect block found > e2fsck: aborted > My question is: Is this behaviour a bug or intended? This is deliberate. There are two reasons for this: (1) e2fsck -n is currently defined as being equivalent to (a) opening the file system read-only, and (b) answering 'no' to all questions asked by e2fsck. (2) In the case where you *aren't* doing an e2fsck -n, there are certain situations where not correcting an error means (a) that its dangerous to try to fix anything afterwards, and that (b) many of the diagnostics issued by e2fsck can not be relied upon. We could change things so that e2fsck doesn't abort in the case where -n is specified, which would avoid the problem 2a, but it breaks the definition of 1b. It also doesn't solve the problem listed in 2b. Still, if it's really annoying it's something I could consider changing. Let me sleep on it. - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
