[debian-non-standard] Strange file system error

Sven Nieslony sven.nieslony at netviewer.com
Tue Apr 13 23:44:12 CEST 2010


Hi all,

> > Do a write test on all surface, with:
> >
> > badblocks -v -w /dev/sdX

A few days later here my results:

Badblocks didn't find any errors on my USB stick after running on my computer.
So I've tried again, flashed again the kernel to be sure and copied the root file system to the USB stick.
After 3 hours the tmp folder vanished and made the system going mad.
asus-debian:~# ls -alh /
total 80K
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Apr  6  2010 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Apr  6  2010 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K Apr  4  2007 bin
[...]
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root    0 Jan  1 01:00 sys
?---------  ? ?    ?       ?            ? tmp
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4.0K Mar 14  2006 usr
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4.0K Nov  1  2006 var
asus-debian:/# file /tmp
/tmp: ERROR: cannot open `/tmp' (Input/output error)

Immediately after unplugging the USB stick I checked it with the computer and everything was there. A fsck gave me no result and rsyncing (with -avn option) the stick with the extracted tar showed only the usual files (e.g. some files in /var) had changed.

It looks like the router is having problems reading/writing the USB stick.

I had another idea to verify this:
I took a new USB stick and made it the root file system, attached the old one (which was OK after checking with badblocks on my computer and which passed the fsck) and did a badblocks check from the router.
With the first pattern there were almost 500 errors; with the second pattern multiple thousand errors...

Now I did a final check:
Once again the kernel flashed, file system on the new stick and another try - just booting and leaving the router untouched (no login, almost no I/O...). After one night there was no more ping from the router. I checked the stick an it was broken. 

In result one broken stick (fortunately an advertising gift) and one broken router. :-(

Afterwards I borred me an Asus WL-500GP which we had used in the company as openwrt VPN router and started another try: 
This one is up and running since Saturday with almost no issues - after having generated the de_DE.UTF-8 locale which took about 10 minutes the /home folder vanished and it gave me the same result like described above but a forced fsck with mounted file system resulted only with one lost inode. I recreated the /home folder and had no problem since then

Seems to that a high load will cause the routers to have I/O errors on the USB ports. 

I've bought a new WL-500GP on ebay (I found a brand new one for a really good price :-) ) and will start a new try!

Thanks for your help and have much fun with your Asus!

Sven



More information about the debian-non-standard mailing list