Permissions of files go haywire on ReiserFS
 

Hello there.
Today I tried to log on to my computer with the latest Debian distro. Possibly because I use Xfce (lighter on system resources, better for my cranky 12 year old computer) instead of the usual Gnome, the GDM (or KDM, I forget which I use) complains it can't write to ~/.dmrc which is the config file for GDM/KDM.

Well, I logged into a failsafe terminal session to check things out and try to fix it, and since
chown -hR sam /home
chmod -R 644 /home
returned an error saying it couldn't access my files, I did the same thing under su, thinking it'd at least let GDM have permission to write to ~/.dmrc . . .

Now it turns out ls -l /home/.dmrc returns:
?????????? ? ? ? .dmrc
this should say
-rw-r--r-- 1 sam wheel .dmrc

What does this mean?
Has my computer finally gotten round to kicking the bucket?

Sounds like it... at least the drive sounds bad.

I'm not on my reiser machine now, so I don't know the exact command, but you should try booting off of a CD & run "reiserfsck --check" (if I remember the command correctly) on your device to see what it says. Again, because I'm not on my reiser machine, I'm not exactly sure if you do that on the device or on a partition, but the man pages for reiserfsck should be able to help you out.