repeated file corruption in 2.16 - LIKELY SOLVED

[shankargopal]

I'm having some very strange problems in 2.16, which I didn't have before in 2.14 (or in any other Puppy). I'm running 2.16 with Barry's savepuppyd bugfix on a 1 GB pen drive with a 300 meg save file and OpenOffice 2.2 (Barry's sfs), along with a separate sfs in which I keep most of my applications (firefox, thunderbird, enlighenment DR17 window manager, etc.).

I've had file corruption twice today, and lost four files, after shutting down and restarting Puppy. In the first case, an OpenOffice document (saved as a Word document) which was working fine over two or three reboots suddenly failed to open, saying "General input/output error". Abiword was also unable to open it. The file seemed to have only a few characters of gibberish in it. I rebooted in RAM and ran an fsck on the pup_save file, which found some problems with inodes with zero dtime and a few other things, but did not fix the file.

Then the second time, I had three scripts disappear - in that the files were there, but completely empty. Ironically they were part of my backup system, but luckily they had been working earlier and backed themselves up, so I was able to restore from backup.

Two possible circumstances come to mind. The file corruption seems to happen when I switch between a desktop and a laptop, but since that should have no impact I think that's just a coincidence. But I suspect that these were files that were open (in OpenOffice in the first case or in geany in the second) when the computer was shut down. That's never caused a problem before as long as the file was saved (and even if it wasn't, I'd clearly only lose the changes, not have the file corrupted entirely).

Since this is only occurring in 2.16, I'd suspect aufs?

Edit: Now find on a double check that in addition to these scripts I've lost several other documents, and I suspect my mail archives too because thunderbird has just begun downloading them (IMAP system) all over again. I'm pretty sure these were not files that were open, so this is very confusing. They are however files that I worked on during the session.

[shankargopal]

Ok, I have a sheepish confession to make . It turns out my pup_save file was full. Since I use E17, I don't have freememapplet running to warn me. This must be why the corruption etc. all occurred (though I'm a little mystified as to why I received no error messages when shutting down).

So aufs is not guilty. Perhaps Puppy could have a way of indicating this problem to hamhanded users like me?