Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ext4 - grow_buffers: requested out-of-range block <BLOCKID>

[James Broadhead <jamesbroadhead@gmail.com>]

On 12 December 2011 20:55, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, James Broadhead
> <jamesbroadhead@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Apologies; the correct message is:
>> grow_buffers: requested out-of-range block 18446744072382021139 for device sdb1
>>
>> This appears 42 times immediately following mount.
>>
>> Running picasa today, it informed me that one of the files I was
>> working with was corrupted (but put the message in a box too small to
>> read the full path).
>>
>> This makes me think that perhaps the disk is bad.  Any advice, aside
>> from the usual "get your data off asap"?
>
> Does it happen to be a >2TB USB drive? I remember reading about
> problems with some of those. It works in Windows with the factory
> partition/FAT tables because of tricks they do to the addressing that
> works in Windows, but once you reformat it you can't access the >2TB
> areas. Something like that... As far as I recall, you could
> repartition to create a 2TB or smaller partition and that would work,
> but then the rest of the drive was inaccessible.

So on returning to this machine, I see that another USB disk that I
have connected to it is also having those messages printed about it.
This leads me to suspect that it's either an ext4 bug or the situation
that you mentioned above.

Both are Western Digital 2TB disks;
1058:1130 Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
1058:1021 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Elements 2TB

There are 42 messages in quick succession for each disk, appearing to
cycle through the same list of blocks twice. I'll attach the messages.

I'm inclined towards the bad-usb-firmware idea - do you have a link to
where you read about the 2TB partition problem ?

I don't have much time to deal with this at the moment, so I think
that I'll just power them down and wait until I do.


On 12 December 2011 21:52, Florian Philipp <lists@binarywings.net> wrote:
>
> I've looked at the kernel code that causes the error message. It
> verifies that this is most likely a dead disk:
>

Now that I have 2 from the same manufacturer, of similar vintage
causing the same errors, it's probably not simultaneous failure
(unless I'm super-unlucky!). It's also entirely possible that it's an
ext4 bug, so I'll try with a different kernel;
Linux broadhej-D830 3.1.2-gentoo #2 SMP PREEMPT Sun Nov 27 17:41:32
GMT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz GenuineIntel
GNU/Linux
... although I didn't see this problem until recently. (Or maybe I
just didn't notice it ... )




On 12 December 2011 22:44, Adam Carter <adamcarter3@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've looked at the kernel code that causes the error message. It
>> verifies that this is most likely a dead disk:
>
> It would be worth running smartctl from smartmontools to see what it
> knows of the disks status.

Having suffered with a faulty power supply for a while, I'm pretty
good with smartmontools - if you read the Google paper though, you'll
see that it only predicts failure in ~50% of cases. Thanks though!

James