I did not see the original message, but I have seen the effect of a
trashed inode table twice before (due to faulty hardware on both
occations)
On one occation the drive power supply was loose leading to horrific
corruption and bad sectors.
The second occation was due to a faulty IDE controler (or possibly DMA
controler etc) which caused serious corruption when both IDE channels were
used at the same time. This caused my inode table to be destroyed on a
regular basis when my machine started swapping to the second disk (the
writes were due to inode atime updates) :( I soon learned the wisdom of a
read only root partition, and backups !
Maybe the various inode table corruptions have all been due to hardware
faults, but I've gotten enough reports of them that I'm starting to
wonder if there's some other cause (say, a race condition in the buffer
cache code, or some such). During the Linux 1.2 days the number of
reports of inode table corruptions were almost non-existent, but there's
a lot more now. Then again, there are a lot more Linux users, too, so
maybe it's just simply a matter of statistics. I've never been able to
find any correlation between the hardware reported by different folks
who have reported the problem.
- Ted
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