dos filesystem panic

[Jiri Baum <jiri@baum.com.au>]

Hello,

every week or two, I get a filesystem panic on one of my dos partitions,
and when I reboot to DOS, sure enough, it's a mess.

I don't know which comes first, the panic or the mess.

I fix it (PC Tools diskfix and/or DOS chkdsk), and a week or two later it's
back.

Any idea what might be causing that?


The message in the log is usually `fat_free: deleting beyond EOF', and it
sets the filesystem read-only.

In kern.log, this is preceded by:
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: 03:01: rw=0, want=210587, limit=194737
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: 03:01: rw=0, want=210587, limit=194737
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
  Feb 16 07:31:04 legend kernel: 03:01: rw=0, want=210587, limit=194737
...


I don't think it's the kernel, since I recently switched from the default
2.0.34 to my own compiled 2.0.36+sym53c416

They are ordinary DOS partitions; I boot from one of them (using loadlin);
most commonly, the panic pops up when the disk is being used over samba (in
fact I can't remember it happening otherwise). BIOS spins the disk down,
but normally it spins up again whenever I access it.


Jiri
-- 
<jiri@baum.com.au>
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