Customised Firmware version 3.12 has been released, replacing 3.11 due to a rare problem with the updated ext2 utilities in 3.11 which can cause the disk to become unreadable to the Humax following a maintenance-mode disk check. Thanks to MontysEvilTwin for pinning this down.
The risk is very small as it requires a specific corruption to inode flags but to be on the safe side:
If you have installed CFW 3.11 you are advised to upgrade to CFW 3.12 as soon as practical, and certainly before running any disk check/repair (fix-disk).
It's available for download via the wiki now and the release notes have also been updated.
If you have been affected by this, please post a new thread; we should be able to help you recover your disk.
The risk is very small as it requires a specific corruption to inode flags but to be on the safe side:
If you have installed CFW 3.11 you are advised to upgrade to CFW 3.12 as soon as practical, and certainly before running any disk check/repair (fix-disk).
It's available for download via the wiki now and the release notes have also been updated.
If you have been affected by this, please post a new thread; we should be able to help you recover your disk.
Since one of the main improvements in 3.11 was in the disk repair process, many many disk checks were run on lots of different units by the beta testers with no problems encountered.
However, since upgrading and running a disk check, two users have reported that their hard disks have become unreadable to the Humax. MontysEvilTwin identified this as being due to the filesystem gaining a feature flag which is not supported by the Humax kernel, specifically the inline_data flag which is an ext4 extension for storing tiny files and directory data directly within an inode, saving a filesystem block.
Analysis of the e2fsck code indicates that this occurs when an inode is detected in pass1 that is flagged as holding inline data. In this case, with the -y option that fix-disk provides to e2fsck, the filesystem feature flag will be turned on making the disk unreadable to the Humax.
Since the Humax kernel does not support this flag, the most likely cause is a corrupt bit in the inode flags field that previously did no harm and was not detected by older versions of e2fsck.
This should be fixable by identifying and backing up the affected files and then running e2fsck by hand and answering alternately NO and YES for each inode. Although the prompts from e2fsck are unclear here, the NO indicates that the filesystem feature flag should not be turned on and the subsequent YES will clear the problem inode. Another approach is to use debugfs to edit the inode directly but that requires more understanding of the file-system to do.
CFW 3.12 includes e2fsck 1.42.13 which is the latest release in the 1.42 train and does not supoprt inline_data. It is the same version that was included in CFW 3.10.
However, since upgrading and running a disk check, two users have reported that their hard disks have become unreadable to the Humax. MontysEvilTwin identified this as being due to the filesystem gaining a feature flag which is not supported by the Humax kernel, specifically the inline_data flag which is an ext4 extension for storing tiny files and directory data directly within an inode, saving a filesystem block.
Analysis of the e2fsck code indicates that this occurs when an inode is detected in pass1 that is flagged as holding inline data. In this case, with the -y option that fix-disk provides to e2fsck, the filesystem feature flag will be turned on making the disk unreadable to the Humax.
Since the Humax kernel does not support this flag, the most likely cause is a corrupt bit in the inode flags field that previously did no harm and was not detected by older versions of e2fsck.
This should be fixable by identifying and backing up the affected files and then running e2fsck by hand and answering alternately NO and YES for each inode. Although the prompts from e2fsck are unclear here, the NO indicates that the filesystem feature flag should not be turned on and the subsequent YES will clear the problem inode. Another approach is to use debugfs to edit the inode directly but that requires more understanding of the file-system to do.
CFW 3.12 includes e2fsck 1.42.13 which is the latest release in the 1.42 train and does not supoprt inline_data. It is the same version that was included in CFW 3.10.
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