Re: File Corruption in Kernel 2.4.18

[J. Hart]

     I must apologize for the delay in replying to the many helpful 
responses I received on this problem, and I'd like to say "thank you 
very much" (Domo Arigato Gozaimasu) to the many who looked into this on 
my behalf....:-)

Here's the status so far:

     I ran the e2fcsk utility which did not detect any problems on the 
hard drive.  I had not known about the IBM DFT utility until it was 
suggested by one of the responses, so I picked that up and tried it.  I 
ran the quick test, which immediately indicated two corrupt sectors.  I 
ran the Corrupt Sector Repair Utility (which does not seem to be 
documented in the manual that comes with DFT) after backing up, and 
repeated the tests a couple of times.  There were no more complaints 
from DFT.  I will be reloading my test directory, which I had to dump 
before the backup, and I will repeat the copy test on Monday after that 
to see if the file corruption still occurs.  

     I do not know what caused the corrupted sectors, but I am giving 
serious thought to a new mother board (to get rid of the chipset and 
Promise controller), and perhaps a replacement for the "IBM DeathStar". 
 I'll let you all know the outcome of the tests on Monday.  I am still 
curious about the precise 4k damaged blocks.