On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:45:41PM +0100, Toralf Förster wrote: > /me wonders, whether the following messages should force me to *immediately* > reboot the system of whether I should schedule a reboot in the near future : In general, if you're not sure, the answer is yes.... > 2012-11-19T19:37:20.188+01:00 n22 kernel: EXT4-fs error (device sdb3) in ext4_new_inode:933: IO failure This means that you have some kind of hardware or media error, probably in an inode bitmap block. There are some planned patches to try to isolate out failures when reading from a block or inode bitmap, but they aren't yet in mainline yet. > 2012-11-19T19:44:33.734+01:00 n22 kernel: EXT4-fs error (device sdb3): mb_free_blocks:1300: group 424, block 13916749:freeing already freed block (bit 23117) This means you have a corrupted block bitmap block. When deleting a file, we found that some data blocks that should have been marked as in use, were marked as freed. That's actually not dangerous, but it's likely that if you have this problem, that you might have the reverse, which is a data block which should be marked as in use, but was marked as freed. The reason why is dangerous is because ext4 might decide to allocate a block which is still in use, which would lead to data loss when that block is reused. Some future patches might make it safe(r) to continue after seeing this error (by preventing any allocations from that block group), but even then, you're probably going to be better off forcing an fsck run as soon as possible. For now, I would strongly recommend it. Regards, - 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