[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] buaser:
Hello. At first I want to ask if any of you working on Gingerbread experienced "Force Close" loop on restart for many applications (for repair required format /data backup or restore via CWM)?

I spent a lot of time to get to the source of the problem, because even though the system version of JB's okay, it's GB is more stable and does not eat much RAM, moreover is much better for multitasking in the current situation.

Get to the point. The problem appears to be that from time to time, as in any filesystem, in the user partition (/ data) errors may occur that normally are repaired at boot time by e2fsck program. Moreover, in the case of my own and yet another piece of Samsung I8160 e2fsck is unable to complete repairs due to an error related to the library supports file systems.

When I connect ADB in recovery mode, umount /data and issue the command "e2fsck -y -f /dev/block/mmcblk0p5" the mass of errors are discovered, and repairing starts, but of course does not end well:

"FILESYSTEM WAS MODIFIED,
invalid argument passed to ext2 library while rewriting block and inode bitmaps "

...which tells that filesystem was modified, but the wrong argument was passed to the filesystem library and the correct structure not been written completely, resulting in an even greater massacre on the partition. It is not difficult to guess that the system will not boot normally (/data mounted in read only mode), and applications will start the "Force close" loop .

The story is not only on my phone, but also in other arts. After formatting it for a few weeks until you see the error and restart. After restoring a backup via CWM has usually only until the next reboot.

Has anyone experienced this? Is anyone able to solve this problem?

I tried stock ROM and kernel, reflashing, substitution of e2fsck binaries and libext2fs libraries. Chip does not have bad blocks, checked by dd command and calculated CRCs.

Please don't reply "do full wipe," not considering myself an Android noob, I want to solve the problem.

Have you ever tried to do filesystem check on Gingerbread and did it work for you? "e2fsck -y -f /dev/block/mmcblk0p5" ?

Can you restart the phone without problem?

Can you try if it works now?

Part of the log with dmesg at boot:

<4> [10.306152] EXT4-fs warning (device mmcblk0p5): ext4_clear_journal_err: Filesystem error recorded from previous mount: IO failure
<4> [10.306213] EXT4-fs warning (device mmcblk0p5): ext4_clear_journal_err: Marking fs in need of filesystem check.
<4> [10.331756] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p5): warning: mounting fs with errors, running e2fsck is recommended

============SOLUTION==============

No one in this and general android forum was able to help me. So I had to find solution on my own.

It seems, that CWM 5 (on my 2.3.6 XXLL2 Samsung I8160 kernel) formatting procedure has bugs, and after some restarts, e2fsck tries to repair filesystem, but it can't because of non standard(?) structure on partition.

How to solve this:

Get your own mke2fs binary and boot into CWM, connect ADB and format /data using mke2fs. This works fine with e2fsck. No more this problem, just don't use CWM to format/restore /data, just backup/restore it via dd.

If you want to go back to old good&stable GB on I8160 and need help, write me a PM, I'll send you gtalk/jabber.==