Corrupt Filesystem "file system is larger than device"

[Robin King_1]

After a reboot last night, one of our FS are corrupt. I've tried a full FSCK, and this is the error I'm returned:

vxfs fsck: file system had I/O error(s) on user data.
file system is larger than device
vxfs fsck: cannot initialize aggregate
file system check failure, aborting ...

Dmesg shows this:

msgcnt 1 vxfs: mesg 021: vx_fs_init - /dev/vg00/apps file system validation failure

Any ideas how to resolve this?

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Robin,

Do you have a good backup of this filesystem ?

Robert-Jan

[Simon Hargrave · Accepted solution]

it sounds like someone did an lvreduce without reducing the filesystem, so truncated it. in which case a restore from backup is likely to be the only solution.

[Robin King_1]

I have a backup. I guessed that may be the route I had to take ;o)

Thanks

[Eric Antunes]

Hi,

Did you use the following command?

# fsck -F vxfs -o full /dev/vg00/apps

If so, try:

# fsck -F vxfs -o full,nolog /dev/vg00/apps

Best Regards,

Eric Antunes

[Bill Hassell]

lvreduce has no knowledge about filesystems. Think of lvreduce as a big axe that chops off space from a disk. The directory knows nothing about this and once it happens, there is no recovery using fsck because some of the data has been removed. If you remember how big the lvol was before the lvreduce, you can try returning it back to the original (or larger) size. Then see if fsck can make sense out of it. lvreduce is a dangerous command, like rm, so use with caution.

Reducing a filesystem is almost always going to destroy the data. The one exception is the very latest version of Online JFS (3.3). Even then, I would always assume that making a filesystem smaller will fail. In all cases, you don't use lvreduce for a filesystem--you would use fsadm (and have the extra-cost product Online JFS installed).