Hi,

I have an old computer with a 20 Gb hard drive that I use for backups. It runs debian testing and has a partition formatted as ext3 that I use for backup (through samba and nfs).

I was copying a 3 Gb file over nfs to the ext3 partition and al of a sudden the partition get's mounted as read only. dmesg gives me:

attempt to access beyond end of device
hda3: rw=0, want=15310080336, limit=35021700
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda3: rw=0, want=18775108824, limit=35021700
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda3: rw=0, want=18656719192, limit=35021700
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda3: rw=0, want=15310080336, limit=35021700
attempt to access beyond end of device
hda3: rw=0, want=15310080336, limit=35021700
EXT3-fs error (device hda3): ext3_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 2168567241, count = 1
Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT3-fs error (device hda3): ext3_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 3761848279, count = 1
EXT3-fs error (device hda3): ext3_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 2493966715, count = 1

after rebooting I can no longer login (after username and password I get looped back to the login prompt). After runing fsck on both my root partition and the data partition all as well again. There is however a serious crack in my trust in ext3. Does anybody of you know what caused this? Will it happen more? Should I change filesystem? Is my hard drive the problem? Should I stop nagging and get on with my life?

Under some of the older kernels, the maximum file size ext3 supports is 2GB.

it's a 2.6.5 kernel, and the error happened over the 2 gig boundary

If you wanted to copy big files to the drive it would be a good idea to create the filesystem with 4k blocks and big file support, etc... read man mke2fs Better to be sure it can take the big file...