topic Re: file system bad blocks in Operating System - Linux

file system bad blocks

Kranti Mahmud — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:17:49 GMT

Dear all,

In one of our storage (MSA 500), one of the disk fail, and we replace the disk. After replacing the disk for about a week, it resumes in rebuilding state. Then we reboot the storage along with the server and then it shows one of the lvol of vg01 is fail to up with the following error code:

dev/vg01/lvol3 contains a file system with errors, check forced. Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Inode 8 has illegal block(s). Clear?

Then we hash out the lvol and up the server, but when we try to mount the lvol it fails by showing some error as it has some bad blocks and need file system check. But file system check is not completing and goes hang after some time. Now, we running the below command:

fsck -yf dev/vg01/lvol3, and it progressing slowly without any error. My question is, what is the status of this, it is recovering or not? If its fail to recover, is there any other way to retrieve all data of the lvol as its very important to save those data.

Please response ASAP.

Rgds-Kranti

Re: file system bad blocks

Matti_Kurkela — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 21:01:22 GMT

> fsck -yf dev/vg01/lvol3, and it progressing slowly without any error. My question is, what is the status of this, it is recovering or not?

That is impossible to know for sure without a lot of diagnostics. If you have a support agreement, now is the time to use it.

The slow progress could mean that the disks have difficulties reading the data, but still manage to read it successfully after many retries.

Your MSA probably has at least one disk that is almost failing, perhaps more than one. If the filesystem check completes, you should immediately take a full backup of the data before using the MSA any further.

If the filesystem check fails, try to mount the filesystem in read-only mode, then backup as much data as you can. Then contact HP support for more advice, if possible.

A RAID is no substitute for regular backups. I fear you might be about to learn this the hard way. :-(

MK

Re: file system bad blocks

Kranti Mahmud — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 03:38:30 GMT

Hi Makki,

Tons of thanks for your valuable suggestions. Please tell me how to mount in read-only-mode only or any other way to retrieve data as we have to do so.

Secondly, is it feasible to login the storage through console to check the status right now or we should wait a little more as file system check it still progressing?

FYI, at present there are 2 disks that has problem, one failed yesterday morning, I reseat the disk and till now its in GREEN state. Another disk fail a month ago, I did replace that disk with a new one, but till now its in rebuilding state.

Please suggest to proceed.

Rgds-Kranti

Re: file system bad blocks

Kranti Mahmud — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 03:39:24 GMT

Hi Matti,

Sorry for my inadvertent spelling mistake of your name.

Rgds-Kranti

Re: file system bad blocks

Viktor Balogh — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 07:27:23 GMT

>Please tell me how to mount in read-only-mode

from "man 1m mount":

-r Mount the specified file system as read-only.
Physically write-protected file systems must be
mounted in this way or errors occur when access
times are updated, whether or not any explicit
write is attempted.

so your command will be the

# mount -r /dev/vg01/lvol3 /mnt

Re: file system bad blocks

Viktor Balogh — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 07:31:53 GMT

The above is for HP-UX. If you're on Linux, use the following command (it should also work on HP-UX):

# mount -o ro /dev/vg01/lvol3 /mnt

From the vg name, I thought it's about HP-UX. Maybe you're in a wrong forum?

Re: file system bad blocks

Kranti Mahmud — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:16:33 GMT

Hi Viktor,

The OS version is RHEL-4. Anyways, thanks for your suggestions...let me work on that and will get back to you ASAP.

Rgds-Kranti