Troubleshooting Tip: How to detect affected device for file system error 'EXT3-fs error (device)...unable to read inode block'

[sokano]

Description
This article describes how to detect affected device for file system errors such as "EXT4-fs error", "EXT3-fs error" or "EXT2-fs error".

EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=20, block=5

EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure

EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)) in ext3_orphan_add: IO failure

EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)) in ext3_new_inode: IO failure

EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)): ext3_readdir: directory #98113 contains a hole at offset 0

From this output, you can focus on (device sd(8,1)) , 8 means the major number which reserved for SCSI devices. 1 is the minor number for the accommodated SCSI disks.  With the command "diag hardware deviceinfo disk", you can get the list of those disks in sequence. With the example output, the first partition /dev/sda1(boot) listed below should be the (device sd(8,1)).

# diag hardware deviceinfo disk

Disk Internal-0(boot) ref:      29.8GB    type: SSD [ATA SanDisk SSD i110] dev: /dev/sda

  partition ref:     247.0MB, 202.0MB free  mounted: Y  label:  dev: /dev/sda1(boot)

  partition ref:     247.0MB, 204.0MB free  mounted: N  label:  dev: /dev/sda2(boot)

  partition ref:      28.8GB,  28.8GB free  mounted: Y  label:  dev: /dev/sda3

Disk HDD1            ref:  16 111.8GB    type: SSD [ATA F2CSTK251A10-012] dev: /dev/sdb

  partition ref:  17 110.0GB, 109.5GB free  mounted: Y  label: 3ADCB5A04FDC1840 dev: /dev/sdb1

Disk HDD2            ref:  32 111.8GB    type: SSD [ATA F2CSTK251A10-012] dev: /dev/sdc

  partition ref:  33 110.0GB, 109.9GB free  mounted: N  label: 316F4E46548DC8D2 dev: /dev/sdc1

The second error message "EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,17))" points to the partition sdb1 on disk1

A first approach to resolve "EXT4-fs", "EXT3-fs" or "EXT2-fs" errors is by formatting the log disk as described in the article below:
Technical Tip: Standard procedure to format a FortiGate Log Disk