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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!newspump.sol.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!news1.iamerica.net!news From: matt@skyblue.com (Matt Barron) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: File corruption by OS problem Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 14:57:53 GMT Organization: LDS I-America Lines: 40 Message-ID: <53j3dd$prh@news1.iamerica.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.101.60.21 X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 I'm running FreeBSD 2.1.0 on a P90, 32mb RAM, with an Adaptec 2940 running the following SCSI peripherials: ID 0 - Seagate ST32550N ID 1 - Conner CFP2105S ID 2 - Seagate ST15230N ID 4 - 9-track SCSI tape drive The ID 1 and ID 2 hard drives are new. The system has been up for about a year with only the first (ID 0) hard drive and the SCSI tape drive. I disklabelled/fdisked/newfs'ed the new hard drives by hand. I created a single partition/slice on each drive (/dev/sd[12]a). The whole installation procedure went fine (once I figured out how to do it). After I came back up, I move some of my database onto the new drives. The system ran for a while, then I started getting complaints from my database software. It turned out the database files were corrupt. I then wrote a simple program to test the drives. The program just opened a file and wrote sequential bytes (0x00, 0x01, 0x02, and so on) until the disk was full. It then closed the file, reopened it, and started reading and verifying the data. This program reported that the data was corrupt - what it wrote was not always what it read. The corruption started about 16mb into the file and was widespread after that. My program reported that the corrupt bytes usually (but not always) contained 0xff instead of what it expected. The corruption was usually in a pair of (e.g. two consecutive) bytes. Either I have a weird hardware problem, or I configured the disks improperly when I fdisk/disklabel/newfs'ed them, or FreeBSD has a bug. The first may be true - does anyone else have as many SCSI peripherals as I do on a single bus? The second may be true, but I can't figure out anything I did wrong. I hope the third is not true, but am beginning to wonder. Anyone have any thoughts?