Aaaaarrgh!

As I reported last night, I compiled the 4.4.8 kernel:
http://bkhome.org/news/201604/linux-kernel-448.html

This morning, powered-up my laptop, clicked on "sda5", my main working partition, about 400GB with ext3 filesystem.

I edited 'quicksetup', to fix the firewall checkbox, then went to save and got an I/O error.

I found that sda5 has been mounted "ro" (read only). I unmounted it, clicked again to mount it, this time it mounted "rw", but looking at the filesystem with ROX-Filer, I find corruption, directories have become I/O errors and replaced by triangle-with-exclamation-mark icons.

I rebooted, with Quirky 8.0 and 4.4.7 kernel. Mounted sda5 and now the filesystem looks OK in ROX-Filer. Oh dear.

I unmounted sda5, started "fsck.ext3 -p /dev/sda5", which reported errors and check is forced, but then was taking a very long time, so I did a CTRL-C.
Instead, I am using "cp" to backup all of sda5 to an external drive.

I decided to back it up as-is, then I will finish the fsck and backup again.

Of course, I haven't backed up in awhile. I hope that I don't have to pay a big price for this slackness.

Hard disk or RAM failure, maybe. But it is quite a coincidence that I compiled 4.4.8 last night. Then, going back to 4.4.7, my filesystem looks OK again.

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Comments

Just a little note about this problem.
That happened early this morning. I went back to 4.4.7, did a f.s. check, and have been happily using sda5 since then.
No apparent corruption.

Immediately after posting to my blog this morning, I sent an email to Greg KH, the top guy for kernel updates. No reply yet.

I doubt that would be the cause of my filesystem error. Anyway, I have been running 4.4.8 for many hours now, no problem.

So, what caused the hiccup? Is my laptop showing sign of age? When did I buy it? Ah, July 2011:

Tags: linux