My UPS power went "bleep", my system shut down. Boot back up and start getting errors. Well, finally figure out my /var is jacked.
Why? power dip.
How? beats the heck out of me.
How to fix? not sure yet

so we booted to Knoppix

this is what my /var looked like....
?--------- 29 root root 4096 Jan 31 2008 var


now it looks like this

?rwsrwsrwx 29 root root 4096 Jan 31 2008 var


so, chmod works
when I run file against /var, I get...

root@Knoppix:/mnt/sda2# file -s var
var: ERROR: invalid mode 06777

otherwise, file works against text files and other valid directories

lost+found has nothing
e2fsck says all good
so does badblocks

I'm thinking if we can flip the bit back to say it's a directory, it may pull up the rest of it. otherwise, it just may be a painful reinstall.

Sorry for the question, but Knoppix mounts the hard disk(s) read only. Did you remount read-write?

Problem solved. back at the LUG last night, we ran e2fsck WITH THE -f option. NOW it finds an inode error (8-bit vs 16-bit) with it recognizing the file type descriptor of '?' as invalid. then we get stuff showing up in lost+found. took us a few more hours but we managed to get it up and running without reinstall. using the system now to post.

Thanks for coming back with the solution .