HELP! Having strange inode problems

[Mark W. Snitily]

Any help with the following problem would be greatly appreciated.

First off, the system:
   386/ix 2.0.2   (33Mhz Micronics, ESDI primary disk)
   SCSI 1542A controller
   Imprimis 94191-766 SCSI secondary disk

I've been having strange inode problems on one of the file systems on
the SCSI disk; I don't think this is the infamous System V inode problem.
The file system giving the problems is about 250MB's in size and has the
max number of inodes that one can allocate (65488).  It's used for news
so it gets a lot of use.

Currently the correct number of free inodes is about 37000 and used 28000.
In the middle of unbatching news, it *suddenly* reports no free inodes.
This has happened to me about 4 times in the past week.  My recourse has
been to unmount it, 'fsck' the partition to correct the inode count in
the super block and then reboot.  If I try to 'mountall' after the 'fsck'
I typically get the following panic:

   PANIC: athd_recvdata: LOGIC ERROR -- missing MEMBREAK
   Trying to dump 1952 Pages...

Are there any gurus out there that could explain this panic to me?

Could having a bad block in the middle of the file system's inode list
cause this behavior?

Suggestions on how to fix this?

Thanks.

-- Mark

Mark W. Snitily                 Consulting Services:
894 Brookgrove Lane             Graphics, Operating Systems, Compilers
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mark at zok.uucp