[arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

[Javier Vasquez]

On 1/25/10, Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

:-)

I've done it already several times.  Actually when I get the ext4
corruption, I can reboot and everything work necely after rebooting.
If I use a live CD to do "fsck -p -f" I get actually no error at all
other than the common non contiguous stuff.

Corruption only happens when runing xscreensaver.  By not using it I
have no problems at all.  Corruption seems to be non persistent since
it goes away by rebooting (although hard reboot is required once it
happened).


-- 
Javier.