Re: [gentoo-user] "deleted inode referenced" [SOLVED]

[Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net>]

091108 William Kenworthy wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-11-07 at 12:05 -0500, Philip Webb wrote:
>> In the course of trying to get X to work on my ASUS 1005HA netbook,
>> I had to power the machine off several times.  In the course of this,
>> some damage seems to have occurred to the file system.
>> There are files in  /var  /tmp  which I can't remove:
>> the msg is "EXT2-fs error: ext2_lookup: deleted inode referenced: 16388".
>> I got round the problem by creating new dirs, copying everything else
>> & renaming the dirs, but that leaves me with  /bad1 , which I can't remove
>> as it contains a reference to an inode which no longer exists.
>> BTW is Ext2 the best fs for this machine ?  Might Ext3 or Ext4 be better ?
>> -- I use Reiserfs on my desktop machines.
> Have you tried fsk on it? - "man e2fsck"

Sorry to those who suggested this: I didn't think of it,
as I haven't used Ext2 (except for /boot ) since 2003.

> My personal experience is
> ext2 is only for those occasions you dont value the data at all

That's my impression from yesterday's potential disaster (wry smile).

> ext3 isnt much better
> unless you use "data=journal" to get some basic protection.

It seemed behind Reiserfs back in 2003, when I built ANB2,
& I kept it for ANB3 in 2007; there's never been a problem with it.

> use Reiserfs though this may need a complete reinstall.
> Updates are still occuring to the Reiserfs code in the kernel,
> so Reiserfs is not abandoned by any means.

I haven't updated R-fsprogs since 071222, tho' there's a minor revision.
Of course, that doesn't mean the stuff in the kernel is that old.
It wb a pity if it's not maintained at least till Btree-fs is reliable.

Anyway, I've reformatted my partitions to Reiserfs without re-installing
(clever, aren't I ? -- big grin).  Besides  /  +  /home ,
I have a big hangar-openspace partition I call  /z  ( 60 GB ),
which is useful for unpacking stuff & has  /z/tmp  for Emerge to use.
I created a dir  /z/store3 , then did 'cp -a bin /z/store3' etc
for all the dirs in  / ; next I used SystemRescue to reformat  /dev/hda3 ,
which is mounted as  / , then 'cp -a' everything back again.
And it worked !!  Similarly for  /home  & for  /z  itself (using  /store6 ).
NB WARNING : if anyone else wants to do this, 'cp -a' is your friend,
but be very careful to proof-read all your commands as you do it
& use 'du' etc to check that the data really is being copied;
some of the copies take a few minutes, but they do get there.

So far, I'm very impressed with the ASUS 1005HA & even more with Gentoo,
which is perfectly fit for this kind of job.  Try a binary distro,
run into any kind of problem & what can you do ?  Gentoo makes it work !

Now I have to resume getting X to work properly.

-- 
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