*BSD News Article 54694


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From: salex%/etc/HOSTNAME (Scott Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Corrupted filesystem with Adaptec 2940
Date: 7 Nov 1995 01:50:42 GMT
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
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Message-ID: <47me1i$gue@netnews.upenn.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: gummikuh.cis.upenn.edu
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

I've brought up FreeBSD on 2 different machines and each time, my filesystem
has become corrupted.  The machines in question are Pentium 133's (Tyan
motherboard) with Adaptec 2940 SCSI cards (w/ a Connor 1G disk and a NEC
CD-ROM and, on one of the machines, an HP 2G disk), an ATI Mach64 VGA
card, a Soundblaster 16, a 3c509b, and, on the machine with the HP
disk, a Boca 28.8 modem.  On the machine with the single disk, I installed
2.0.5.  In the first instance, after completing the install on a Friday,
I found the machine incapable of booting on Sunday when I stopped by
work.  After reinstalling, the filesystem was again corrupted, this
time when I was performing a find in /usr.  I rebooted after noticing
that the status of the /usr/lib directory was inconsistent (causing
dynamic linking to fail), but fsck wasn't able to clean up the system
sufficiently to make the system usable.

I then switched machines for unrelated reasons and installed 2.1.0-951026-SNAP
thinking that perhaps the 2940 driver was immature in the 2.0.5 release.  In
this case the system stayed up for a week before the filesystem became
corrupted this weekend.  The / partition sustained some damage (I no longer
have a spwd.db and thus no root account), but the /usr partition is the
one that was hit particularly hard.  After running fsck -y I have hundreds
of files in lost+found.

Does anyone have any insight on what could be causing this?

Thanks,
Scott Alexander
salex@dsl.cis.upenn.edu