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Old 5th December 2008
Gemini Gemini is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2008
Posts: 7
Default HDD formatted UFS under AMD64 experiences weirdness under I386

Background:

I installed FreeBSD 7.0-Release/AMD64 onto a 640GB SATA hard drive a few months ago. I sliced the drive with the standard assortment of partitions, but also including a large 550GB s1e partition for my media files.

Things were mostly fine with the install, except that I kept coming across an increasing number of apps that were broken under AMD64.

Eventually, I reinstalled the system using 7.0-Release/I386. I kept the original partitions, simply having sysinstall format them before unrolling the base tarballs.

Everything appeared to go fine until I rebooted. After the kernel was done initializing, garbage characters started appearing on my screen, and exec was complaining that numerous binaries were not proper ELF format. Reboot, and other files came up as garbage.

So, I grabbed my install CD and rebuilt the system again. This time, I deleted all of the partitions except for the 550GB s1e partition. Wash, rinse, repeat. Same garbage on reboot, same issue with binaries not being proper ELF format.

Move to a different computer, download the ISO again, verify Md5 checksum, burn a new CD-R, validate copy, and try again on the original system. No improvement. Run a non-destructive HDD bad sector scanner. No errors.

Grab a spare 10GB hard drive, install 7.0-Release/I386, boot off of it. No problems. Run FSCK against the s1e partition of the 640GB drive, no errors. Mount the partition, no errors. Try to play some of the media files... corrupted. The Md5 fingerprints of almost any file over a few KB in size is off.

Install 6.4-Release/AMD64 on the 10GB drive. Bring everything up and check out the media files on the 640GB drive and... all of the files are fine. Not an error to be found, not an Md5 checksum to be mismatched.

Huh. That's nice.


Question:

Has anyone else encountered this file corruption issue when moving from AMD64 to I386? I didn't see anything jump out in the bug reports.
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