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.