I have a drive formatted with the Reiser file system. It is not Reiser4, but an older version. This drive is used only for file storage, and doesn't have any of the OS files on it, so I can mount and umount it as needed. This is on a Debian Sid system, amd64 if it matters.

Here's the problem: There is at least one folder that I cannot perform any operations on. I cannot rename it, delete it, or even browse the contents. Other folders seem to be unaffected, althought there might be more than one. When I try to browse it or anything else I get a stalled message from konqueror. Could this be a problem with the file system, the disk, both? What tools are available to troubleshoot this further?

What error do you get from a terminal when you try to

rm the folder

mv the folder

cd to the folder

ls the folder?

Do you get the same result as root as when you are not?

I wasn't getting any error at all, it just sat there like it was processing the command but never progressing. In a terminal I would hit enter after doing one of those commands and it would take the command but never finish and go back to a prompt for me to enter another command.

to make matters even more confusing the folder I had problems with is now gone. I'm wondering it maybe it cleaned itself up during a reboot when it checked the journals? I am totally confused now. Couldn't do anything with the folder for the longest time and now it is gone. I have done several apt-get upgrades and dist-upgrades since then, so maybe something got updated that helped fix it?

Well, the good thing is that it's fixed.

I wish all the problems fixed themselves like that

Update - the hard drive was in fact bad. Sometime after I originally posted this the disk seemed to just start working normally, I had file access and everything seemed fine. I thought it could be related to my upgrading the kernel...maybe the reiser module was improved? Over the weekend I was hitting that drive pretty hard and started having problems again. One thing I had trouble with was the trashbin in KDE 3.4...it would fail to empty it. I would get an error saying the process died unexpectadly when trying to empty it. I rebooted my machine and discovered that about 4GB of files had disappeared from the disk (not ones I deleted either). After searching and not finding a good linux surface scan tool I downloaded and ran Maxtor's drive checking utility. Didn't take long at all for it to determine the disk was failing.

Is there any way for your system to notify you of any disk errors or filesystem errors it finds? This was on a reiser 3.6 partition. If I would not have had those files backed up to my home NAS I would have been very upset about losing them. I'm looking for a way to at least know what could be going on with a disk without having to run a bootable CD if I suspect a problem.

The new disk I installed is formatted as ext3. Is this better for data integrity? I noticed it will automatically check the disk every so often. On my debian Sid system I didn't have any utilities installed to check a reiser 3.6 partition so I always got errors/warnings at boot about not being able to check the disk. Are there utilities for this? The reiser4 utilities don't seem to do it.