Weird filesystem problem (RH 9)

mtraven · 01-16-2004, 12:38 AM

I'm a relative Linux newbie with a filesystem that is displaying odd
behavior. I can't figure it out and I hoped one of you experts could
help me.

This is Red Hat 9. I (foolishly) downloaded and installed a bunch of
new software, and when this was through, some of my directories had
disappeared. Specifically, /misc appeared empty although it used to
have three big subdirs in it.

This panicked me, not that the contents of the directories were so
valuable but once file start vanishing randomly who knows what is
going on. This is an ext3 filesystem.

Here's the weird part:

fsck -fn on the filesystem (while mounted) reveals some problems
(orphaned inodes, corrupted lists, wrong block counts). But they can't
be fixed while the filesystem is mounted.

If I mount the filesystem with Knoppix (which mounts it as ext2) the
missing files have been miraculously restored. Furthermore, fsck on
the filesystem reveals no problems.

Booting up the original Red Hat system in single-user mode has the
same behavior as Knoppix: files are there, fsck thinks everything is OK.

But in the normally running system, files are still gone and fsck
reports damage.

In other words, the only state that reveals the problem is one that does
not allow it to be fixed! Argh!

I thought this might have something to do with journalling, so I
converted the filesystem to ext2 and then re-created the journal. This
had no effect.

Anyway, I'm stumped and so is my local neighborhood Linux wiz. Anybody
want to lend me a clue?

Lindy · 01-16-2004, 01:04 AM

I'm not going to pretend to know exactly whats going on, but what was all the new software that you (foolishly) downloaded and installed? Could be that some of that new software broke some links

coolamit78 · 01-16-2004, 01:31 AM

Well, I dont know the reason, but you should not run fsck on a mounted partition...

Boot from your bootdisk ( i.e linux startup floppy) which will bring you to the login screen....Now as root, run fsck on the root partition and see what's the output....does it still show the same behaviour or does it correct the problems that it reports?

Regards,

amit