xfs_repair misses an fs error?

[Dave Chinner]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 04:47:32PM -0700, Keith Keller wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I recently had a filesystem stop, and went through the usual umount,
> mount, umount, xfs_repair path.  xfs_repair didn't find any errors, but
> I noticed that I was still getting some strange issues where a file in a
> directory didn't have an inode and was resulting in IO errors.  Thinking
> to address the problem later, I moved the directory to a different
> location on the filesystem so that future backups could proceed
> normally.
> 
> Later, in an attempt to collect log errors, I re-ran xfs_repair on the
> filesystem.  It then found errors and corrected them, and on remount, I
> found that the directory in question was repaired and no longer had a
> file entry with no inode.  (So I can't reproduce that output; I didn't
> save it, thinking that the second xfs_repair wouldn't fix the issue, and
> I'd generate it again before posting.)
> 
> Has anyone else seen a situation where xfs_repair misses a filesystem
> problem, but then finds it if a file or directory is moved?  And more

Not recently. What version of xfs_repair are you using?

> generally, is there a way to use xfs_db or similar to try to find other
> inodes that might be causing similar problems?

xfs_repair -n is the usual way to find broken stuff without
modifying anything....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com