Hello folks

I've come across a problem on a friend's computer.

The computer is fairly old (see below), running Ubuntu 10.10, with / on a 40GB IDE drive, and /home on a 120GB Maxtor SATA drive.

It's /home that's the problem. It's on a single partition /dev/sda1, formatted as ext4. I've run the Maxtor diagnostics on the drive, and no problems were reported.

Ubuntu wants to check the filing system on every boot. Running 'fsck -f' manually (from Knoppix 6.2) gives:

  Block bitmap differences: <some number ranges, different each time>

Sometimes it also offers to fix:

  Free blocks count wrong for group #<numbers that change each time>

I choose to fix those problems, but they're still there next time.

I've also run 'fsck -fc /dev/sda1' -- it didn't report any bad blocks, and the other were still there.

So I rsync'd all the files to an external hard drive, recreated the filing system with

  mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

and fsck'd the empty filing system -- it was fine.

I then rsync'd the data back with

  rsync -av <backup dir> /dev/sda1

ran fsck again, and the errors have returned!

Why would copying data into a filing system cause errors like that?

Googling hasn't turned up anything useful.

As I mentioned, the PC is old, and a few capacitors on the motherboard are looking a bit swollen, so I would accept the possibility of random freezes or other weirdness. But this doesn't seem like randomness -- it's consistently wrong.

cheers

Chris
--
Chris Dennis                                  [email protected]
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK

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