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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!apollo.hp.com!netnews From: sommerfeld@apollo.hp.com (Bill Sommerfeld) Subject: Re: Power outage mangles /etc Sender: usenet@apollo.hp.com (Usenet News) Message-ID: <CJs9sK.I7t@apollo.hp.com> Date: Mon, 17 Jan 1994 16:57:56 GMT References: <1994Jan13.222516.11328@allegra.att.com> <2haica$js0@homer.cs.mcgill.ca> Nntp-Posting-Host: snarfblatt.ch.apollo.hp.com Organization: Hewlett Packard, Chelmsford Site Lines: 29 In article <2haica$js0@homer.cs.mcgill.ca>, Marc WANDSCHNEIDER <storm@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote: >In article <1994Jan13.222516.11328@allegra.att.com>, >Henning G. Schulzrinne <hgs@allegra.att.com> wrote: >>Last night, we had a brief power outage. All the 250-odd Suns and SGIs >>in this part of the lab came back up, with no dire consequences. My >>eight NCR PCs running NetBSD 0.9 all had random stuff (apparently from >>some include files) written over the /etc/ directory and who knows >>where else, forcing a reinstall of the operating system. fsck >>complained, but couldn't fix anything. While the NCR PCs were on a >>surge suppressor, most workstations are not. Is this expected behavior >>(i.e., are commercial derivatives of BSD like SunOS just plain more >>robust), is it the PC hardware or just a very bad day? > > if this is the case, then you might have been hit by a pretty serious > bug in the wd driver. nobody seems to be sure what causes it, but > there are some pretty annoying consequences. I've seen this happen at least once; basically, inodes 32..64 got shifted over by 4 inodes, so that the contents of file N were under the name of N-4. (I don't actually recall the direction of the shift). Four inodes "fell off the end". BSD inodes are 128 bytes, so this corresponds to an error of one disk block (512 bytes) when transferring a buffer back to disk.. The machine in question has two Maxtor 210MB IDE drives. - Bill