Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ext4 - grow_buffers: requested out-of-range block <BLOCKID>

[James Broadhead]

On Dec 13, 2011 12:25 a.m., "Paul Hartman" <paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:03 PM, James Broadhead
> <jamesbroadhead@×××××.com> wrote:
> >> Does it happen to be a >2TB USB drive? I remember reading about
> >> problems with some of those. It works in Windows with the factory
> >> partition/FAT tables because of tricks they do to the addressing that
> >> works in Windows, but once you reformat it you can't access the >2TB
> >> areas. Something like that... As far as I recall, you could
> >> repartition to create a 2TB or smaller partition and that would work,
> >> but then the rest of the drive was inaccessible.
> >
> > So on returning to this machine, I see that another USB disk that I
> > have connected to it is also having those messages printed about it.
> > This leads me to suspect that it's either an ext4 bug or the situation
> > that you mentioned above.
> >
> > Both are Western Digital 2TB disks;
> > 1058:1130 Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
> > 1058:1021 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Elements 2TB
> >
> > There are 42 messages in quick succession for each disk, appearing to
> > cycle through the same list of blocks twice. I'll attach the messages.
> >
> > I'm inclined towards the bad-usb-firmware idea - do you have a link to
> > where you read about the 2TB partition problem ?
> >
> > I don't have much time to deal with this at the moment, so I think
> > that I'll just power them down and wait until I do.
>
> The problem I was referring to was for drives LARGER than 2TB (I think
> the real limit hits somewhere around 2.1 or 2.2TB).  So if your drives
> are 2TB then I don't think it's that problem.
>
> I use a 2TB external USB drive myself (LaCie brand, with a pair of
> spanned 1TB Samsung disks inside), formatted as ext4, and it works
> fine. However, that was not always the case. I had to replace the USB
> cable after I suffered a lot of corruption and random USB disconnects.
> Later on, the drive started going offline and making the click of
> death, and eventually failed to start up. It turned out to be a faulty
> power supply. They sent me a replacement free of charge, despite the
> drive being out of warranty, and it worked perfectly fine with the new
> power supply. And it has worked fine ever since.
>

Actually, a bit more triage shows that these errors are triggered on mount,
and only when using pmount. Mounting manually as root doesn't trigger them.

I'll have another look through my logs to see if they've happened at other
times, but for the moment I'll stop using pmount and see if it reoccurs.