From: utzoo!watmath!dmmartindale Newsgroups: net.bugs.4bsd Title: Re: Problem with dump(8) Article-I.D.: watmath.3055 Posted: Mon Jul 19 12:58:18 1982 Received: Mon Jul 19 19:47:05 1982 References: physics.105 We've also seen the garbage block numbers when dumping an active file system. The best explanation I can come up with is that the inode gets reallocated (or just truncated and rewritten) during the period it is getting dumped, and the copy of the inode (or a double-indirect block) in dump's memory which points to an indirect block on disk is thus out of date. Now, if this stale inode points to a disk block as an indirect block when in fact it's been reallocated as a data block, you'll get garbage when using its contents as block pointers. The few times this has happened here, we've aborted the dump and restarted it, and it has always worked fine the second time. (Although it's painful having to restart a 6-reel dump.) Dave Martindale