Ramiro Aceves wrote:
> Alexandre Ratchov wrote:
...
>>>What could cause this disaster?
>>>
>>>Please, feel free to ask me for any information that you need before I
>>>wipe the entire disk and install a fresh OpenBSD again.
>>>
>> 
>> 
>> hello, 
>> 
>> The last year a had similar problems because of a bad IDE cable. In few
>> hours there were randomly corrupted files, but no disk error messages in the
>> log.
>> 
>> Finally a changed the cable and installed a fresh OpenBSD.
>> 
>> regards,
>> 
> 
> Hello Alexandre and OpenBSD fans:
> 
> Many thanks for the information. As you and other OpenBSD friend said, I
> must search for disk failure or cable failure. I am going to install a
> fresh OpenBSD 3.7 and see whether I can reproduce the file corruption.
> This IDE disk is the slave of my main master disk (first IDE cable), so
> they are sharing the same cable.  Of course that the slave disk
> connector can be broken (loosy  connection). I am going to do some disk
> tranfers and move the cable back and forth and see whether it tiggers
> the corruption problem.
> 
> Do you know of any disk test or utility program that can stress the disk
> to work hard until it fails?

I'd agree, looks like a hardware problem.
Note the age of your 1G drive...it has got to be close to ten years old.

OpenBSD's file systems are very solid.  What you saw is a very
extraordinary event.  I've seen something close to that only a very few
times in many years and many machines of working with OpenBSD, and it
always involved a power-off in the middle of some disk activity, and
that's not what happened in your case.  I routinely freak people out by
tapping the power button on an OpenBSD machine if it is not convient to
login to do a proper shutdown (yeah, I make sure it isn't busy at the
time, but otherwise, just hit the button).

Good way to work a hard disk: Unpack ports or source tar.gz files,
'specially with softdeps off.

Nick.

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