On Tuesday 21 October 2003 06:37 pm, Bryan Whitehead wrote: > Glenn Burkhardt wrote: > > I've seen a couple of times that files are filled with zero's after > > rebooting. This time it was my ".bashrc" file. I might have just powered > > off the machine, but the this file wasn't open for writing at the time of > > shutdown. After turning the machine on last night, I noticed that my > > shell prompt had changed, and discovered that the file was full of ASCII > > null characters. > > > > I've seen this happen a couple of times before on other machines. Then > > the file "/usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc" had been similiarly trashed - full > > of zeros. And, it seems that the file size was larger than usual. > > > > I've been using the XFS filesystem on these machines for a couple of > > years now. Is this a failure of the disk drive, or should I switch to > > ext3 ?? > > > > Thanks. > > If you do not cleanly shutdown your machine your filesystem will not be > fully commited to disk... And you will have problems like this. > > What version of mandrake? mdk8.1 had a problem with not shuting down > clean even when using the halt command.
Mandrake 9.1 with the updates: kernel-2.4.21.0.25mdk-1-1mdk SGI XFS 1.3.0pre2 I checked my system logs, and I definately just hit the power switch instead of doing a shutdown. I wouldn't be surprised if files that were "in play" were corrupted when the power is just turned off, but my .bashrc file hadn't been touched in a long time. In the other cases I've seen over the years, it was with Mandrake 8.1, and the /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc file, which does get touched each time a user starts a session. I did find a reference to a suspiciously similar problem: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs11.html but it claims the problem was fixed in XFS version 1.1. But seeing the file filled with zeros makes me wonder. If the power goes off, I can stand having files that are being written trashed, but files with modify times older than 30 seconds have to be there, save a hardware failure.
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