[plug] Hardware problem or kernel bug?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 03:03:04PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| 
| I've been running one of our servers on reiserfs since well before there 
| was an ext3. We needed the journalling, /now/. Its been rock solid, as 
| has my home box. I strongly suggest that you check your hardware, and 
| ensure that the harddisk is running correctly. The only time I ever saw 
| problems like that, it was due to a slowly failing hdd controller on the 
| motherboard, and was corrupting both the reiserfs and ext3 filesystems 
| on the machine.
| 

I've come to a similar conclusion (hardware problems) during the course
of this afternoon.  As much as I'd love to pin all the world's problems
on Hans Reiser, it doesn't appear to be the case:

The machine in question was flaky back when it was running Windows, but
I'd just assumed it was Win95 being flaky, not the computer itself.
I moved the system onto a different drive, and ext3, and reinstalled
all of the packages on the machine. It segfaulted a few times, and
eventually corrupted dpkg's database badly enough that apt-get refused
to do anything at all.

BTW: e2fsck on Woody grizzles every time the machine boots up because
the file system version is newer than it can understand or some such.
Is there some way to convince a new mke2fs to make a filesystem that an
older system can understand, or vice versa?

Cameron.