Hi there, I'm facing quite a bad problem here im my Linux Box, and I'd like to try a bit more before I give up, format the HD and reinstall it all...
Last tuesday I had to shutdown Linux because I had to do some work on Win98, unfortunately... The shutdown procedure worked fine, I worked all afternoon on Win98 and shutdown the machine to go home... Yesterday I came back and, to my surprise, when I tried to boot on Linux the system halted with a "kernel panic: unable to mount root fs on 03:02" (I guess these were the numbers)... Next thing I plugged my HD in another Linux box and ran "e2fsck -y" on it... As I already expected, after complaining about a whole lot of errors, when it exited I only had a /lost+found" dir, with lots of subdirs and files in it... Lucky enough, by browsing the subdirs I could rebuild the whole root dir structure (it seems e2fsck only moved the complete root dirs to /lost+found and renamed them with those numeric names - the whole subdir tree inisde each of them was 100% preserved), and I was left with some empty dirs and some "weird" files that seem to be "undeletable"... When I tryed to boot, I doscovered the default boot image was corrupted (crc error), but lucky enough the other images worked fine, so I just booted from one of them and ran "lilo" again; then the computer booted fine and everything worked perfectly! Now, I'm left with one final problem... the files and dirs left on /lost+found can't be chown'd, chmod'd or erased... all of them (except for one) have the first permission bit (when doing "ls -a -l") either b, c or s... also, some of them seem to have a HUGE size (like 4294967295 in 2 of them), but then when I select them on MidnightCommander it recognizes a negative size... Also, some show invalid sizes, like (on ls) "1, 7" or "164, 246" (with the spaces)... Also, all of them have a name that starts with "#"... Lastly, when I run e2fsck again it complains about "fsck.ext2: Ext2 file too big while calling ext2fs_block_iterate in pass 1b" and then finds two duplicate blocks (always on the same two pairs of inodes)... If I try to run "e2fsck -c" it complains about the "file too big" thing and aborts... I'm almost sure it is related to the /lost+found files... Now, how can I get rid of them? Is there a chance, or will I be forced to format & install it all again? TIA, Guilherme Zahn
