ext3 crash on arch linux and repairing
 

hi all,

last night my server crashed. it is responsible for backup of another server, using rsync over ssh. the disk has three partitions: boot, swap, and /
the / partition is an ext3 filesystem. i was getting the following error on the console when i noticed the machine was not responding when I tried to ssh to it:

EXT3-fs error (device hda3) in stat_transaction: journal has aborted

this error kept coming up on the console screen continuously. I tried rebooting and got the message the ext3 system had errors, and i entered root console mode to fix the filesystem. unfortunately I couldn't unmount it since all software was on it, so I rebooted using a live CD, unmounted the filesystem, and then ran fsck to fix it.

i kept answering yes to fix all errors (it asked to link nodes to /lost+found several times, as well as reporting empty nodes which it asked to clear).

after that, the system rebooted fine, and everything seems to be working ok, but I'm a little worried now that some of my data or software is gone and I still need to fix more. how do I find out what I need to fix now on my system?

I found a lot of files in /lost+found now, but not sure what to do with them or to find out what files they used to belong to.

any help appreciated..

bert

Journal:
Data is written twice on the harddisk: in the filesystem and then in the journal. After the write process is commited (performed), the journal is cleared.
Data stored in lost+and are files, where the write porcess is not performed. You may try to recover them, but you should not do that.

recover?
 

so.. if i understand correctly, I don't have to do anything to fix my file system? the files in /lost+found contain data that is still on my system ? i didn't lose anything?