[SOLVED] Ext3 filesystem corrupts after upgrade from Ext2

daveginorge · 10-31-2011, 06:34 AM

Hi All CentOS 5.7 x64 RR2680 raid card Intel S3210 MB Xeon CPU

I have just installed a RR2680 Raid card. Created a Raid 5 with 6 1.5TB disks. Each time I create the journal system ext3 and write to the raid it goes into "Block Device Read Only".

If I create the same raid and stay with ext2 then all seems well. This is not raid size dependent. I have split the raid into 2 x 3 disk raid 5 and still get the problem.

The system worked OK using ext3 on Linux software raid with the same drives.

Is there an underlying problem with ext3 that I am not been aware of.

I can see the answer is stay with ext2. It's just that I have a want to understand where the problem is.

Any help or advice on this would help me a lot.

wpeckham · 10-31-2011, 01:52 PM

It may be a problem with the driver for the RAID card.
Had I 9 Gig of disk to form into a 7.5 Gig RAID5 or 6 Gig RAID6 I would want EXT4. On the other hand, I would also want CentOS 6.

Have you attempted any other journaled file systems? XFS, ReiserFS, JFS, etc?

syg00 · 10-31-2011, 06:10 PM

+1.
Might be worth looking into the I/O scheduler as well. If the hardware is caching, best to let it handle it.

daveginorge · 11-02-2011, 06:34 AM

Thanks for the replies.

Strange thing I have found.
If I create the ext2 file system in parted

Code:

parted /dev/sdb1
mklabel gpt
mkpartfs primary ext2 0 7501GB
quit

Create the ext3 filesystem

Code:

tune2fs -j /dev/sdb1

When I write to the partition it fails and switches to "Block Device Read Only" almost immediately.

If I create only the partition in parted

Code:

mklabel gpt
mkpart primary 0 7501GB
quit

Create the ext3 filesystem

Code:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

When I write to the partition everything is stable and works fine

Can someone throw some light on what's happening here. I wasted a horrible amount of time on this.
What I did learrn from this was the relationship between <blocksize> <max filesize> and <max filesystem size> so i suppose it was not all in vain.

I have now taken the advice from "wpeckham" and implemented the ext4 filesystem.