Hello folks
I've come across a problem on a friend's computer.
The computer is fairly old (see below), running Ubuntu 10.10, with / on
a 40GB IDE drive, and /home on a 120GB Maxtor SATA drive.
It's /home that's the problem. It's on a single partition /dev/sda1,
formatted as ext4. I've run the Maxtor diagnostics on the drive, and no
problems were reported.
Ubuntu wants to check the filing system on every boot. Running 'fsck
-f' manually (from Knoppix 6.2) gives:
Block bitmap differences: <some number ranges, different each time>
Sometimes it also offers to fix:
Free blocks count wrong for group #<numbers that change each time>
I choose to fix those problems, but they're still there next time.
I've also run 'fsck -fc /dev/sda1' -- it didn't report any bad blocks,
and the other were still there.
So I rsync'd all the files to an external hard drive, recreated the
filing system with
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
and fsck'd the empty filing system -- it was fine.
I then rsync'd the data back with
rsync -av <backup dir> /dev/sda1
ran fsck again, and the errors have returned!
Why would copying data into a filing system cause errors like that?
Googling hasn't turned up anything useful.
As I mentioned, the PC is old, and a few capacitors on the motherboard
are looking a bit swollen, so I would accept the possibility of random
freezes or other weirdness. But this doesn't seem like randomness --
it's consistently wrong.
cheers
Chris
--
Chris Dennis cgdennis@???
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
