Strange fsck message

[lgsit]

Hello!

I had some sort of strange situation on my Fedora 16 system a few days ago.

My current machine is about 3 months old and running fine. So, the problem described below was the first problem I've experienced.

I use RealCrypt and I have

a) an encrypted container (NO encrypted partition) on my local hard disk (with "ext4" if I'm not wrong) where I save my important data onto.
b) an external hard disk with an encrypted partition (also "ext4"), where I backup the contents of the encrypted container once in a while using "rsync"

Inside RealCrypt I also check the file system of the encrypted container and the external encrypted partition (there is the option "Check Filesystem" inside the reight-click menu and RealCrypt uses "fsck" for that check).

The last time I checked the container, I got the following message:

HTREE directory inode (...): node has invalid depth (0)

(If relevant, original message in German

HTREE Verzeichnis Inode (...) hat eine zu große Verzeichnistiefe von (0)

)

But it was the only message I got. I googled a while and I found out that this message may occur when resizing an ext4 filesystem (which may cause a defective filesystem), but

a) I did not change the encrypted container filesystem itself at all
b) in case of a defective filesystem there are "some" more messages than just one

I then answered

Repair?

with "yes". After the check "fsck" told me that the filesystem has been modified (what a surprise ). I then dismounted and remounted the encrypted container and then checked the filesystem again.

Result: Filesystem is clean

Now I wanted to know, if any files are corrupt. So I did the following

rsync -av <RealCryptContainer>/* <ExternalRealCryptPartition>/

to sync the files from the container with my external partition incrementally. I checked the console output of "rsync" which files have been transferred and checked all of them. I was able to read and edit them without any problem. So it seems like none of the transferred files is corrupt.

I (luckily) didn't have any Linux filesystem problems in the past, so I cannot tell if the above message is something serious or not. Maybe someone can help me.

Thanks in advance!