[plug] Ext3: attempt to access beyond end of device

[Cameron Patrick]

Daniel J. Axtens wrote:

> The journal is corrupted. My opinion is that you should back up your
> drive, wipe it, run a bad block test, and. if the drive is not
> destroyed, reformat it and put your data back.

Eeee.  The first bit of advice is sound -- it would probably be safest
to boot into knoppix or System Rescue CD and dd an image of the drive
onto another machine.  Failing that, back up whatever data you can.
That's good advice in general, of course :-)

I'm not sure about purging it by fire though.  If fsck thinks the
filesystem is okay, and there's no further hardware fault, you're
probably fine.

Now the I/O error -

>> 23:55:52 attempt to access beyond end of device 

could mean a corrupted file system (fixable by fsck), could mean
faulty RAM or cable, could mean a corrupted partition table, or could
be something else entirely.  If these errors went away after fsck then
perhaps you were lucky...  whatever the cause, if data is being
corrupted then that it a bad sign, and likely a hardware problem.

I note that none of the errors you quoted came from the IDE subsystem,
so it's quite possible that the drive itself is fine.

You can see what the drive thinks of its own health by running
smartctl (in the smartmontools package for them what run Debian):

  # smartctl -a /dev/hd(whatever)
  [...]
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   057   051   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       127719436
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   098   096   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       15
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   089   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       836514076
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   093   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       6883
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       16
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   036   048   000    Old_age   Always       -       36
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   057   051   000    Old_age   Always       -       127719436
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
202 TA_Increase_Count       0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  [...]

You can also ask smartctl to get the drive to run a self test and
various other things.  One of the important fields here is
Reallocated_Sector_Ct.  If it's non-zero, you have a drive with bad
sectors and might want to complate buying a new one.

You might also want to run memtest86 on the machine and make sure your
RAM is okay.

Cameron.