Alexandre Ratchov wrote: > On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 03:34:34PM +0200, Ramiro Aceves wrote: > >>Hello Friends. >> >>I am new to OpenBSD (but not to Unixes), my experience with this OS is >>only a month. I was getting more an more confortable with the OS, and >>getting in love with it, but today I have experienced a very weird and >>strange thing. >> >>My OpenBSD testing system is installed on the second IDE disk (1GB). >> >>I was enjoying on a happy X-window fluxbox session. I installed "links" >>WEB browser package with pkg_add -v ftp://..... , as usual. I was >>surfing the net sometime (ppp connection). I stopped the WEB browser and >>opened an xterm window, in order to search for certain man page. I was >>surprised because I could not see any man page! The error was something >>like: "/etc/man.conf/ Not a directory". I stopped the X-window session >>and attempted to enter at the console. I was not able to do it. I seemed >>that /etc/ directory suffered some kind of damage. >> >>Login: root >>Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio login: cannot stat /etc/login.conf: Not >>a directory >> >>Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio passwd: /etc/pwd.db: Not a directory. >> >>Login incorrect >>Login: >> >> >>and so on. >> >>I started thinking that something serious could have happened, but I >>trusted on a reboot. I rebooted the system and it prompted for single >>user mode (I do not know if this is the right word, I called it like >>that on Linux). I ran and #fsck /dev/wd1a and it discovered plenty of >>errors in the /etc/ directory and some other directories. It created a >>lost+found with the found garbage...... >> >>After the cleaning, I rebooted again, but the /etc/ directory was wiped out. >> >>Also /var/ directory dissapeared. I have searched for /var/log/* >>information on the lost+found directory but no luck. >> >>Luckyly, this system is only a system for fun. ;-). >> >>What could cause this disaster? >> >>Please, feel free to ask me for any information that you need before I >>wipe the entire disk and install a fresh OpenBSD again. >> > > > hello, > > The last year a had similar problems because of a bad IDE cable. In few > hours there were randomly corrupted files, but no disk error messages in the > log. > > Finally a changed the cable and installed a fresh OpenBSD. > > regards, >
Hello Alexandre and OpenBSD fans: Many thanks for the information. As you and other OpenBSD friend said, I must search for disk failure or cable failure. I am going to install a fresh OpenBSD 3.7 and see whether I can reproduce the file corruption. This IDE disk is the slave of my main master disk (first IDE cable), so they are sharing the same cable. Of course that the slave disk connector can be broken (loosy connection). I am going to do some disk tranfers and move the cable back and forth and see whether it tiggers the corruption problem. Do you know of any disk test or utility program that can stress the disk to work hard until it fails? Any suggestions will be apreciated. Regards Ramiro.
