I run debian/unstable and I know the risks involved with that. Woke up and I found my computer to seem to be operating normally. The screensaver was on and running. I clicked the mouse to turn it off and my normal apps were still running. I used xmms open->dir to pop in some mp3s, and the filesystem it listed was:
/ (blank) (blank) (blank) (blank) ! Omp a d d g pRac sbin v v This was rather unusual so I went to an open eterm to use ls. But ls couldn't be found. I also had two emacs open, and I was going to use them to browse around the filesystem, but they died when I tried to use C-x C-f. Odd. So I went to one of my eterms and tried scrolling through the buffer using the mouse wheel. This caused the eterm to die. I'm not sure where eterms store their buffer, but now I started to suspect memory corruption. So I rebooted in hopes that the filesystem thing was just memory corruption. Nope. Something has really messed the fs up. Before I restore from backups, I'd like to isolate what happened. And I'm wondering if anyone has seen this kind of problem recently? I can give whatever hardware/software configurations if needed, but holding short for now. Here's a summary of the problem: * Happened overnight * Most recent significant OS change was a dselect update/install (last night) * Most recent hardware change was a new stick of ram (now about .5 months old) * I used the SCSI controller recently (yesterday) to access my CDR. I use the "old AIC7xxx" in the kernel because the new driver doesn't boot. * hdparm options: -m16 -d1 * Machine is behind firewall, and has few services for external access I suspect hardware failure caused it, but there are still a few software unknowns. I'm starting to lean on corruption due to using -m16 for hdparm. Any other suggestions appreciated... All I can think of for now. Going to quarantine the drive. :) -- Mike Brownlow ><> http://www.wsmake.org/~mike/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1024D/8AA6EAFD 3861 96B3 EEA2 285C BE23 F706 3E1E EBB2 8AA6 EAFD

