However, I want to make a suggestion:
An error like the famous 'attempt to access beyond end of device'
usually is a Bad Thing (TM), and usually data loss is an immediate
consequence after the first of these messages shows up (it probably
happened even before that). And it tends to get worse if the disk is
being synced afterwards. So most of the time the best choice seems
to be to turn off the machine (or reset it) hereby stopping the kernel
from corrupting the filesystem further. By default ext2 ignores errors
in filesystems; I think that it would be preferable to make remount ro
or panic the default, since it will save people from losing too much
data when they are not big filesystem specialists. (yes I know you can
use tune2fs to change that, but who thinks about that when installing
distribution XY on his server?)
When you are running a production server where data loss is BAD (even if
you manage to backup your data every day), you might prefer that the
machine halts (most of the time just 30 seconds earlier) and keeps corruption
as low as possible. In my case just the recovery of the important data
of the last day using the various ext2 tools took 6 hours (e.g. the first
six superblocks were gone).
Thanks for ext2ed and e2fsck!
Hermann Schichl
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