reiserfs slight occasional corruption on software RAID-5 arrays
 

Hi, I'm using Slackware 10, Linux 2.6.9 compiled from the full source, and my system runs a variety of software RAID arrays on an ASUS A7V-133 board (yeah I know, old but faithful), which has an additionnal onboard PROMISE IDE controller.

Each IDE device is master on it's own IDE bus (HD: hda, hde, hdg, DVD: hdc). hda is a 30 GB 1½ year old WD, hde and hdg are 160 GB twins from same company purchased 2 months ago.

RAID5 array for / and a separate RAID5 array for /usr are giving me some woes. I have a RAID1 array for /boot on the 160 GB drives, and RAID0 arrays for /tmp and and a monster (well, by my -previous- standards) 260GB /media for MP3s, DivXs and similar.

RAID0 and RAID 1 don't give me any problems, but every now and then, even with clean shutdowns (which I do once per month approximately), I get slight filesystem corruption, usualy one or two directories, which requires me to boot from CD, and run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/md0 or md1...

I am looking at the possibility of imminent failure of 30 GB hda, but before purchasing another drive, I wanted to know if any of you have encountered similar problems which were caused by reiserfs... I can rule out failure of PROMISE hardware or drivers since corruption never happens on the filesystems hosted on it's bus.

I've had problems ith reiserfs on RAID 5 when I have a power failure. Never any problem on normal shutdown. Are you setting the fs_freq & fs_passno (5th & 6th fields) in your fstab?

did you ever resolve the specific HDD as failing?

so power outages with RAID5/ReiserFS cause corruptions, as well with clean shutdowns? i saw another topic discussing not being able to reboot after a power outage.

I don't know if you're asking the original poster or a generl question, but, in general, nothing should harm a RAID5 other than a failing drive... even at that, if you have a proper rebuild procedure, that should cause little to no ill effects.

my power outage problem stemmed from a crummy RAID card (made by Promise - most are crap) that would not detect all hard drives every time it booted & wouldn't notify you until the logwatch came through... It instead loaded into some odd mode that would allow you to read/write, but any directory that you wrote to would then be corrupted once the RAID was brought back up in full... so if you write one file to the root of the RAID5 array, all data is lost.

Reiser does have some fairly decent recovery tools & I was able to get most of my data back. I've since moved to 3ware cards (I'm running 3 of them in 2 machines) and have not had a single problem since. I'm running one huge RAID5 and two RAID0s that are, themselves, striped together... The 3ware cards now have battery backup units that hold the memory in the event of a power failure to prevent corrupt. Even so, I run both machines through a UPS.