Was seeing a weird error(did not see this in some time now) when trying to enable quotas on a server today, the error was related to /home not being able to apply the quota files:

[root@server home]# quotaon /home/
quotaon: Cannot find quota file on /home [/dev/sda8] to turn quotas on/off.
quotaon: Cannot find quota file on /home [/dev/sda8] to turn quotas on/off.

[root@server /]# quotacheck -acugv
quotacheck: Scanning /dev/sda5 [/] done
quotacheck: Checked 1736 directories and 11094 files
quotacheck: Scanning /dev/sda8 [/home] quotacheck: Something weird happened while scanning. Error 2133571361

If you get any error like this then try and check /var/log/messages for a probable cause:

tail -f /var/log/messages

In my case here is how the output was looking:

Apr  3 15:58:30 server kernel: [ 1113.734047] Buffer I/O error on device sda8, logical block 852029
Apr  3 15:58:30 server kernel: [ 1113.734066] Buffer I/O error on device sda8, logical block 852030
Apr  3 15:58:30 server kernel: [ 1113.734089] Buffer I/O error on device sda8, logical block 852031
Apr  3 15:58:30 server kernel: [ 1113.734107] Buffer I/O error on device sda8, logical block 852032
Apr  3 15:58:30 server kernel: [ 1113.734123] Buffer I/O error on device sda8, logical block 852033

Conclusion:  the drive was going bad and had to be replaced.

As a follow up on part of this problem if you try to enable quotas on a partition and see the first error “quotaon: Cannot find quota file on /home [/dev/sda#] to turn quotas on/off.” then check if the aquota.user and aquota.group files exist under the partition and if not the create those:

To check if files exist under /home :

[root@server /]#cd /home

[root@server /]# ls -la |grep aquota
-rw——-   1 root root  6144 Apr  3 15:58 aquota.group
-rw——-   1 root root  7168 Apr  3 15:58 aquota.user

If there is no output then those files do not exist and need to be created:

[root@server /]#cd /home

[root@server /]#touch aquota.user

[root@server /]#touch aquota.group