[wplug] FileSystem problems

[Mike Griffin]

I seem to be having some problems with one of my servers and was 
wondering where to start troubleshooting the machine. I would imagine 
that it's at the hardware level.

A fileserver crashed yesterday with a kernel panic. This machine has 
been running for nearly a year, solid. I started getting errors on the 
hardrive during writes to the drive, and accessing was very slow. I ran 
maxtor utilites on the drive and it found a few problems that the 
software fixed. I reinstalled the server OS (RH7.3) and performed my 
data recovery from backups. My backups are stored on the same system 
but on a different HDD, which gets mounted with a script everynight and 
has tarballs written to it, I also ran fsck -t ext3 on this drive 
(/dev/hdb1).  I checked for a new backup this morning, and all was 
well. I just tried mounting the drive a few minutes ago and had a ton 
of bad sector attempt timeouts saying it cannot find a valid FAT 
partition. I tried to run fsck on this partition I get this as a result:

[root at fileserver root]# fsck /dev/hdb1
fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
e2fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
while trying to open /dev/hdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?
[root at fileserver root]# fsck -t ext3 /dev/hdb1
fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
e2fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
while trying to open /dev/hdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

These are two different ATA drives. One is a 20G and one is a 10G. I 
thought it was kind of weird that this would happen to both drives one 
day apart. possibly a controller problem on the motherboard?

Just looking for some leads here.


Mike