Subject: Re: ext2fs fun
To: Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
List: current-users
Date: 03/28/1999 21:30:43
On Sat, Mar 27, 1999 at 11:20:40PM +0200, Antti Kantee wrote:
> Now it's time to cool down, the floppy in question here is broken (I
> hope). I tested with another e2 floppy and it worked fine. Still, random
> panics waiting to happen is not a good thing.
> 
> My system is i386-current 1.3K with kernel + userland from yesterday.
> 
> ideas? advice that will make me feel extremely foolish? ;p
> 

It's known that a brocken filesystem (either on floppy or disk, or vnd)
can panic the system when mounted (it can be with ext2fs, ffs, or msdos).
This is a feature: maybe the filesystem is in this state because the system
messed something up previously (software bug, hardware failure, ...).
In any case I prefer to have the system stop immediatly, than just report
an error and eventually continue to do bad things on the disk.

For unreliable supports like floppies, I'd just suggest to use an MSDOS fs and
mtools, or just tar :)

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--