Error message

[Ryan Armstrong <ryan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone

Last week, the system froze and nothing seemed to happen for a few
minutes. Having the utmost faith in Linux, I decided not to reboot
immediately but to wait and see what happened. Surely enough, The system
became usable again, but on every xterm the following message appeared:
Jan 15 11:40:41 osiris kernel: Kernel panic: EXT2-fs panic (device
03:41): ext2_write_inode: unable to read i-node block - inode=2, block=6

Fearing that a crash was imminent, I shut down all of the open windows
and exitted to the command line login.Here I found that most things were
running smoothly. However, if I tried a ls on the / directory the login
froze. Not even a kill -9 would free up the virtual console. 

I then went into /dev to find the device 3,41 and this turned out to be
: 
crw-rw-rw-   1 root     tty        3,  41 Aug  2  1996 ttyr9

I looked in all the references I could think of for an explination of
ttyr, but could not find anything. Looking again, I assumed that the
device was in some way related to one of the two disk drives (hda and
hdb). So I tried to run an fsck on each -- both hung but were freed by a
kill.

Under further investigation, all command line references to / would hang
the system.

At this point, I performed a shutdown, mainly because I had (real) work
to do. The shutdown itself hung!!!

When the system restarted, all was well and I forgot about it ... till
this morning when I received the following messages in /var/log/messages
:

  Jan 19 01:05:31 osiris kernel: EXT2-fs warning (device 03:41):
ext2_free_inode: bit already cleared for inode 26428
Jan 19 01:05:47 osiris kernel: EXT2-fs warning (device 03:41):
ext2_free_inode: bit already cleared for inode 26425
Jan 19 01:05:47 osiris kernel: EXT2-fs warning (device 03:41):
ext2_free_inode: bit already cleared for inode 26426
Jan 19 01:05:47 osiris kernel: EXT2-fs warning (device 03:41):
ext2_free_inode: bit already cleared for inode 26427

I am now worried  that something serious may happen.
It seems to me to be a hardware issue ( It could NEVER be the operating
system :) 

Can someone please help with advice/explination etc .

Thanks in advance
Ryan
-- 
___________________________________________________________
Ryan Armstrong                 (0ffice): +27 (0)11 646 1435
E-mail  : ryan@xxxxxxxxxx      (Cell)  : +27 (0)82 453 8781
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