Bob Parks writes

Yes, IMHO. As Christian wrote earlier about nebka, there are limits to directory sizes. He seemed to indicate that a cron job with du might have been the entire problem. We have had similar problems in the past.

my theory: du puts stress on the disk, it hits the bad block, and bang!

There are bad blocks on every disk. Bad blocks, unless a large number, do not show that the 'disk' is failing. And again, this is a mirror'ed disk, two disks, in Raid 1, with a hardware controller. Now that I think on it, it is not clear what badblocks on what disk are being reported by the Adaptec controller -

my theory: the disk is one disk to the o/s.

Note that nearly identical hardware exists on Bill's RFE machine and never an error. You have had problems on nebka, and snefru (idential hardware) and raneb (very different hardware). That alone leads me to suspect software.

I don't remember a problem on snefru. The common file set are the adrepec files (common on raneb, sahure, fafner, nebka, mutabor) and the citec files, common on mutabor, raneb, snefru, sahure, fafner (Yes, I back up!). What I think is what's written in 27.2.4. badblocks and e2fsck of http://eduunix.ccut.edu.cn/index/html/linux/OReilly.LPI.Linux.Certification.... They say When a disk is failing, it will usually get an exponential increase in bad blocks, and after a short while it will run out of spare blocks, whereupon you will get into trouble with your filesystems on that disk. It has already run out of spare blocks, that's why some bad blocks show up to the o/s. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel