system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Skip Collins <bernard.collins@jhuapl.edu>]

After running 2.4.0-test11 for a while, my system would occasionally
hang during heavy disk activity resulting in a corrupt ext2 filesystem.
Fortunately, none of the damage has been irrecoverable. I checked
linux-kernel to see if anyone else was seeing the same thing. The recent
threads on corruption seemed to be consistent with the behavior I saw:
ide disk access light remains lit, system hangs, fsck finds bad inodes.
I think test12-pre5 was supposed to fix the problem. But after upgrading
my kernel, I can still get the errors. 

I have a 900MHz Athlon/Asus A7V mobo system with an onboard ata100
promise controller. I have only had problems when my ata100/udma5
harddrive is connected to the promise controller. Using the ATA66 ide
bus eliminates the problem. I typically see the corruption when copying
large (~1GB) files such as vmware virtual disks. It also happens
frequently inside vmware when doing heavy disk access things like
installing software or defragging a win2000 virtual disk.

For now I am going to fall back to the slower ide bus. But I wanted to
let people know that there still may be problems with ext2 corruption in
the latest test kernel.

sc
please cc any replies to me
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