Re: File corruption: IDE hd problem or kernel problem ?

mlord (mlord@pobox.com)
Tue, 26 Aug 1997 17:25:24 -0400

Riccardo Facchetti wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have downloaded the new release of communicator and at the end of
> download (ftp) I've found that the tarball was corrupted (why ??? ... it
> was an ftp connection !!!). Then I have splitted the tarball in 100k
> pieces to find what piece was corrupted and then I've re-downloaded just
> the corrupted one (thanks to an account of mine on an university machine).
> I have extracted the tarball and I was installing it when the system
> blocked. Not freezed because alt-sysreq was working. I have had the time

We cannot be certain about the cause of the original corruption
(short file, maybe -- download failed without telling you?).
...
> After the reboot and fsck, the communicator tarball was corrupted again

Mmm.. filesystem corruption could have caused the second failure,
or maybe something flakey in the I/O cabling or PIO settings.. ??
...
> Then I tried to
>
> tar cfv /u/tarball.tar /usr/src/linux/
> cp /u/tarball.tar /u2/
> diff /u/tarball.tar /u2/tarball.tar
>
> and no diffs.

Note: The diff is probably just diff'ing from memory,
regardless of what actually got written to the drive.

> dd if=/dev/zero of=/u2/a1 bs=1048576 count=40
> cp /u2/a1 /u/
> diff /u/a1 /u2/a1
>
> and no diffs.

Ditto, unless you have less than 40Meg memory.
For this type of test, reboot before doing the diff
if you want to *really* test things.

> kernel hdx msgs:
>
> hda: QUANTUM LPS270A, ATA DISK drive
> hdb: ST51080A, ATA DISK drive
> hdc: ST32132A, ATA DISK drive
> hdd: LTN106A, ATAPI CDROM drive

If it still corrupts when copied to disk, try copying it around
a few times, and then reboot before doing a "diff".

-- 
mlord@pobox.com
The Linux IDE guy