[WBEL-users] attempt to write beyond end of device

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 02:47:34PM -0800, Syv Ritch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The server froze a couple of nights ago. No reaction to the keyboard, 
> but the scroll lock, num lock and caps lock keys where flashing.
> 
> The only way to restart was to press the reset button.

That's a sure sign of a kernel panic (the flashing keyboard lights a
dead give away).

> 
> The only error that I got in /var/log/messages was:
> 
> kernel: attempt to write beyond end of drive
> kernel: 03:03: rw=0,want=0,limit=1541437675

That's a sign that you are writting beyond the end of a device.  I've
seen that a couple of times when a mistake was made with LVM, where
I had re-sized the lv to be larger and extended the filesystem.
Then an error happened and the new size didn't get saved.  On the
next reboot I got those types of errors.

(By any chance did you not cut and paste that?  I can't find that
exact message.  Grep'ing the kernel source for "attempt.*end of"
comes up with several similar messages, but not that one)

Even when grepping for "end of", I can't even find anything that
looks like it could print that message.

It sure looks like it's a typo away (device vs. drive) from being an
error out of:

./drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c:1221

It sure looks like that error is coming from trying to read
/dev/hda3 (the major:minor for hda3 is 03:03 which I'm fairly sure
what the 03:03 in that error message means).  According to the
comment in the code limit should be in units of 1024 byte sectors.

If you start doing some reverse engineering, it sure looks like it
shouldn't have printed that error message.

> 
> This looks like at the end of the backup. I have a SCSI tape AIC7xxx
> The tape drive is almost new [less than 6 month]. Last night the same 
> tape drive and same tape did run OK.

It doesn't look like the error has anything to do with the tape
drive from the error message.

> 
> The backup is 45 gig, the tape is 80 gig native.
> 

What software are you using to do the backup?  Are you in fact
backing up any partition that includes hda3?  Any idea how big the
partitions are?  What type of filesystem is on hda3.  (On all of my
machines, that ends up being swap /dev/hda1 is /boot, /dev/hda2 is
/, /dev/hda3 is swap, and /dev/hda4 is an extended partition that
all of the other filesystems end up on).

	Thanks,
		Kirby