Ok I figured this out and the bug was actually reiserfs. Please close this bug as invalid.
How I fixed it: - booted into runlevel 1 - rsync -ap /var/ /tmp/reiserfs-sucks - unmounted /var - mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda7 # /var partition - sudo sed -i '/var/s/reiserfs/ext3/' /etc/fstab - sudo mount /var - rsync -ap /tmp/reiserfs-sucks/ /var - reboot Strangely enough, dmesg showed 0 errors so reiserfs was doing something funny. As root, I was unable to even ls -l any of those files. I guess reiser3 isn't much better off that the out of tree reiser4. Moral of the story: Friends don't let friends use reiserfs -- package m4 None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/m4.list] failed to install/upgrade: unable to open files list file for package `xsane': Permission denied https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/288467 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
