(I did subscribe to fs-devel, but it seems not to like @sf alias and unsubscribed me after a while - and did that circle a few times; please CC). Have a rather broken hard disk at the moment - the bulk of it is ext3 on top of lvm2 - the default for fedora almost exactly 4 years ago. So been doing a lot of 'e2fsck -fv -y ...' lately. Am a little surprised about what "Entry <file> in <dir> (<num>) has deleted/unused inode <num> Clear? yes" does. it deletes the file. I wonder should it be re-tried, or relocated to /lost+found, or anything else? I also want to make a suggestion: when such a decision is made, I'd like to keep a record of what files are lost, etc. Can an option be added to e2fsck to log its decisions somewhere? Thanks for all the hard-work to make fsck even possible - the hard disk has been well-used :-). For those people who might come across this in the future - here is a tips, and may be another question/discussion about sane behavior on error: it appears that some combination of SATA->USB enclosure plus usb-storage plus usb hci driver doesn't like read errors, and the kernel resets the usb device and reconnects whenever that happens. That has the unfortunate side effect of renaming /dev/sdb into /dev/sdc, etc, underneath lvm2, and causes lvm2 to get stuck. I suppose that's the sane behavior since one wants to stop I/O and further damage, but maybe the kernel should only reset usb storage devices on write-errors, rather than read-errors? And somehow limit the device to read-only access after a read-error? In any case, I somehow found that I could persuade the kernel not to reset the usb device, if I disable read-ahead (i.e. hdparm -a0/-A0). I also tried disabling read-ahead on the lvm2 device itself (-A0 /dev/dm-X, where X is the logical volume), and "echo 128 > /sys/block/sdc/device/max_sectors" (or smaller number). So it seems that slowing it down make it more reliable for an unreliable disk. Maybe this can be made automatic inside the kernel? -- 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
