According to the release notes this bug has been fixed in version 1.40: http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs-release.html#1.40 E2fsprogs 1.40 (June 29, 2007) There was a floating point precision error which could cause e2fsck to loop forever on really big filesystems with a large inode count. (Addresses Debian Bug: #411838) What are the odds of this getting included in CentOS 5.6?