I have experienced a rather catastrophic problem. In the midst of solving a problem related to my CD-RW drive, I've been encountering lock-ups that require rebooting. I haven't yet nailed down the problem, because after about a dozen such hard reboots, I somehow have lost the contents of my entire /usr/lib directory. Needless to say, many important libraries resided in there; I am barely able to boot to a console. ls shows this:

p--------T 90 257 root 70656 Sep 19 15:47 lib|

and my shell highlights the name 'lib' in brown. I don't know what the p or T flags mean, or what the pipe after lib is; at any rate, I can't cd to the directory; I get "lib: Not a directory".

I have e2fscked the drive, so there are no apparent errors. What can I do to get my /usr/lib stuff back, aside from a complete reinstall? Is there an outside chance that I could just toy with chmod and stuff to make it recognize lib as a directory? I've tried the "upgrade" option from my installation discs, but it just fixes a couple packages and does not fix /usr/lib.

Any help would be welcome!

That IS a real problem.

Can you try booting from a 'LiveCD' and mounting your /usr/lib into that tree, at least then you should be able to see an 'uncorrupted' view of the contents.

--ArmedGeek

Thanks for the reply, but as you can see it was long time ago that this happened I don't even remember how I fixed it... I remember trying several things, one of which eventually recovered most of /usr/lib, but a lot of things were still broken, and I might have just reinstalled. I've since switched distros (to Gentoo) and no problems since then!