The other day on one of our machines we had some data loss on /home which is a seperate partition, but not on a seperate drive. Another admin was working on it and ran fsck and it cleaned up a ton of stuff. Since I didnt run it im not 100% sure what it found. We're still looking into the reason for the data loss.

However we have a file that doesnt have an inode:

[root@system #126094562]# ls -il
<snip>
126094583 -rw-r--r-- 1 duse users 1058 Sep 21 2007 noassoc.c
126094592 -rw-r--r-- 1 duse users 2102 Sep 21 2007 operator-comma.c
? ?--------- ? ? ? ? ? operator-logical.c
126094564 -rw-r--r-- 1 duse users 1792 Jan 16 2011 struct-union.c

[root@system #126094562]# rm -rf operator-logical.c
rm: cannot lstat `operator-logical.c': Input/output error
(in /var/log/messages)
EXT4-fs error (device sda7): ext4_ext_check_inode: bad header/extent in inode #126094594: invalid magic - magic 0, entries 0, max 0(0), depth 0(0)

[root@ravana #126094562]# find . -inum 126094594
find: ./operator-logical.c: Input/output error

Trying to remove/move/rename the file or folder its in gives another IO error since it doesnt have an inode. Forcing fsck to run (its marked clean) on the partition doesnt show any errors.

Anyone run into this before? I have a feeling we'll end up just nuking the fileyestem and restoring the files or moving it all to another server, but I'd really like to know what it is.

Thanks!

What could be helpful is 0) system and daemon log file entries from before, during and after the time of the incident, 1) a detailed account of what this admin actually did and 2) an account of events leading up to fs corruption. Without that the only thing you invite is speculation instead of a clinical analysis of facts.