SOLVED! : Please help - URGENT - disk/fsck problems!

[Sean Noonan]

> I'm in need of urgent help.  I have a production 4.9-RELEASE
> server.  I track STABLE, last cvsup/make world was about two
> months ago.  After powering on after an extended power outage
> (was given advanced notice by electric company and I shut the
> server down before the outage occurred), the server hung with
> disk problems and suggested I run fsck.  I ran fsck and came
> up with thousands of errors.  I re-ran fsck and came up with
> less.  I repeated this process for what seems like a hundred
> times.  No matter what I do, though, I still have errors that
> fsck seems unable to repair.  HELP!!

Well, seeing as that I didn't get a single response to my URGENT plea for
help, and noting that necessity is the mother of all invention, I managed to
solve this problem myself (48 hours after the fact with users screaming at
me for 6 of them).  I'm repling to my own post in the hopes it'll be
archived and help some poor SOB like myself should they encounter the same
problem.  I don't know if it was the *right* way to solve the problem, or
even if there were alternative ways.  This method did work, though.  It
resulted in some data loss, but I was illing to live with that since I have
good tape backups to restore from.  Here's how I fixed my problem.

After RTFM on fsck (man fsck) for the 4,341st time, I noticed under the "see
also" section a utility called fsdb, the FFS debugging/editing tool.  While
messing with inodes and such as always scared the hell out of me, I figured
I had nothing to loose at this point.  I went back to my fsck output and
noted that certain errors seemed to never go away, like this one:

INCORRECT BLOCK COUNT I=447212 (5280 should be 4064)

I assumed that the "I" above was an Inode number.

I fired up fsdb with the disk slice in question as a paramenter, like this:

fsdb /dev/da0s1g

This gave me a "fsdb >" prompt.

>From there I issued the command:

clri i-number (e.g., clri 447212).

This apparently nukes the Inode number given to it.

I did this for all the Inode numbers that continually re-appeared after
numerous fsck's.

I typed "quit" (or was it "exit"?) to leave fsdb and then re-ran fsck.

Problem sovled.  Restored from tape (love AMANDA!) and I was good-to-go!

Hopes this helps somebody...

Thanks,

--Sean Noonan


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