Filesystem problems

As reported by Greg Scott:

>thanks for ForthOS-1.0, and for the newsgroup access.
>
>i will post to the newsgroup later, but for now i wanted to give you a
>preliminary problem report from joe user.

I'm forwarding here so that others can see what's up.

>i have a disk committed to ForthOS, with a minimal slackware linux on
>hda1 and ForthOS on hda2. the partitions show up in fdisk as 83 and 9E
>(unknown) respectively.

Ok, so a single disk, two partitions?

>in the event of corruption, i use grub to boot back to linux and dd to
>restore the corrupted portion, which so far has just been SrcFS10000.

That sounds fine.

>the problem reported here is based on installing exactly as you
>explained.
>
>the only problem i am having is that fs.mkdir doesnt work properly:
>A. the largest value of N in "N fs.mkdir foo" that works is 27
>B. although for N<=27 the fs.ls looks good, the new dir is lost after
> rebooting, ie. it doesnt show up in fs.ls, and you can recreate it
> exactly as before and it doesnt complain about already existing.

Although I don't believe it should be necessary, could you do "sync" before
your reboot and see if that changes the behavior?

>C. after a "succesful" fs.mkdir, the next fs.mkdir attempt fails (hung
> system) for any value of N. of course i used a different directory
> name.

Could you "fs.cd util" and then try creating your > 27 block directory
within util? That'll give me a hint whether it's the format of the root
directory or something else.

>i may mention that for values N<=27, i can not only use fs.ls
>repeatedly in the root, but can do "fs.cd foo", "N fs.creat bar", and
>fs.ls in the foo directory displays file bar. however, all this is
>lost after rebooting. as a forth newbie, i may be missing some kind of
>commit operation to write to disk.

Well, there is a "sync" but I tried to have various key operations do
the commit to disk for you. Again, try using it manually at various points
to see if there's something outstanding which isn't getting to disk.

>with N=27, this is the fs.ls display:
>Type Start Length Name
>...
>Dir 13101 1/27 foo
>you can repeat fs.ls for N=27, but not for larger values (it hangs).

When it hangs, can you hit F2 to switch to the second screen?

>in investigating this problem, each iteration starts with a clean
>install of SrcFS10000. after booting into ForthOS, the sequence is:
>10000 fs.root!
>fs.cd/
>N fs.mkdir foo

This is exactly the right methodology for hunting down what's wrong here,
and I thank you for your patience (I know how much tedium is involved in
this level of debugging!).

Andy
Received on 30 Dec 2004 19:51:13 GMT