[arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

[Xavier Chantry]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Thayer Williams <thayerw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez <j.e.vasquez.v at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  Bad thing that xscreensaver corrupted / so that it couldn't be
>> unlocked, and under console there was no way to loging, some misplaced
>> inodes or something...
>>
>> Hard reboot was required, and then at first /tmp was so corrupted that
>> it was necessary a phisical fix...
>
> I can't seem to connect the dots here. How do you propose that it was
> xscreensaver that corrupted ext4?
>
> While it does sound like your ext4 partition may be corrupted, that
> doesn't mean that xscreensaver is to blame; rather it was just another
> victim.  If the partition is corrupted then reinstalling package xyz
> isn't going to fix it.  You need to wipe it and rebuild.
>
> AFAIK there are no known issues with xscreensaver corrupting a
> filesystem and it seems rather unlikely.  The much more likely case is
> that somehow your partition did become corrupted, but it wasn't
> noticed until some time after xscreensaver kicked in.
>

If it's a filesystem issue and not hardware, then hopefully running
fsck will be enough.