Recursive directory surprise

My A1 has been acting a little flaky lately, so I decided I'd better do a fresh backup of at least the System: partition.

I have two physical hard drives, both connected to a SiI0680 card. The smaller of the drives is partitioned similarly to the larger, which is the main drive. The smaller one is a more-or-less manual version of a mirror drive for backups.

When I back up a partition, I just run "copy partitionx: partitiony: all clone" and I have an (almost) instant backup done.

Today, It got all the way to the end of the copy process and kept looping on copying a directory called sysback. Sysback: is supposed to be the name of the name of the System (DH0:) partition when it copies to the second HD for the backup of that partition (SH0: on the little Seagate drive). I have no idea how a directory with that name ended up on the actual system partition. But it was an empty directory except for one directory entry. "Sysback." In fact, it seems there was an infinite number of directories nested under that first Sysback directory. I couldn't delete it, even from a DOS prompt in shell, because ti still showed as having some content (the empty directory.) But every one of them was identical: empty except for a directory named Sysback, holding another directory named Sysback.

Too bad I had already quick formatted the actual partition by that name in preparation for the backup process.

After booting from the OS4.1 CD, I was able to do a directory by directory drag and drop backup onto the Sysback: partition on the smaller HD, and was able to boot from it. I finally got rid of the nested, recursive directory problem by formatting the System: partition and then copying back the fresh drag and drop backup I had done.

It turns out there was also another directory on the "bad" system partition holding an entire backup of my Data: partition, too. I didn't put it there!!! I keep a separate backup partition for that on the smaller HD, too.

The problem seems to be solved now, but I'm a little concerned about how this stuff is getting there in the first place.

All my partitions are formatted SFS00 with 512 block size and 600 MB buffers. I've been running SWAP enabled on a separate, properly formatted SWAP partition, ever since switching to 4.1.

What should I be watching out for here?

Paul

@Paul

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Ninjas.

@LyleHaze

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They are sort of stealthy. Could be.

Paul

@Paul

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While I don't have an idea where this came from, i just wanted to point out that you usually can perfectly delete any directory with content, even if it's just deeply nested by using



The "all" switch causes c:delete to recursively enter and delete the contents of the given directory "foo".

So no need to format a partition just to get rid of a deeply nested directory. Of course, if there were some filesystem errors causing this, then c:delete might also fail with the "all" switch, but then a format can't hurt either

@Cyborg

re: Delete "ALL"

Thanks. I've always been more of a Workbench, visual user. I thought there must be something for commandline which would function like the "Force" or "force all" option which sometimes comes up in pop-up requestors.

Now that the file system is cleaned up, I'll need to find out what's going on with GRIM's for a page-sweep error.

Paul

Hi @Paul

What should I be watching out for here?
Is there anyway to inhibit SWAP, I wonder, for certain cases like this one?
How about directory nesting? I once was caught in recursive loop backing-up SDK to USB drive. It got stuck in PERL; about ten sub-directories deep. Maybe the periscope on the U-Boot is broken.
I don't know!

What's 'page sweep'?

@Snuffy

Check the other thread I started on this forum. There's a link to my error log for the page sweep problem. I don't know what it is, either.But it says it's kernel related.

Paul

@Snuffy

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Sounds like there's a link pointing to another link which then points back to the original one. Badly written file copy routine keeps looping these two links forever. (Or something like that.)

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