I must admit. I ditched Microsoft Windows an year ago, but haven’t yet totally removed the OS since my mother still needs Office 2007 to work on her daily chores. I for once am comfortable with OpenOffice, but she isn’t.

Still, two days ago I ran into a problem with Linux. The problem was that on boot, when mounting the root, a Segmentation Fault occured with the "Assertion failure in dx_probe()" error. Discussions on the .net said it was a kernel bug, I disagree.

Let’s start from the fact that I have an IFS/EXT2 driver for Windows, so I can easily see the Linux partition on my system. This lets me read and write on the partition with ease. The same on Linux, but with no NTFS write support.

Anyway, it seems that the EXT2 driver for Windows isn’t that compatible with a Linux EXT3 filesystem. The IFS/EXT2 driver for Windows webpage warned me of this fact, but I ignored that a few years ago when I first installed the driver.

But let’s go on. Errors like this don’t happen usually. What I remember doing is mounting a .bin image in Windows from my Linux partition. When I rebooted, the error appeared. Seemed like the EXT2 driver had made some modifications to my EXT3 Linux filesystem, modifications that the kernel didn’t support.

Fixing it was simple. I took a Gentoo Live CD, and did an "e2fsck -F /dev/hda5". The check found that the HTREE was broken an inode 2, and fixed the filesystem. Rebooting showed that the error was gone.

Another fix was remounting the filesystem until the default 1 month/31 mounts filesystem check began. To do this test, I’ve made the same mistake and remounted the system three times. The filesystem went back to normal after that.