Here is some more evidence that XFS is in play. When I had trouble with the machine I dumped (dd) the partition containing all data onto an external drive. Now when I try to restore the data in some directories I get read errors (not unexpected). When those read errors occur I get the following trace in the kernel log.
Apr 19 12:05:14 triumph kernel: [ 4132.476952] XFS internal error XFS_WANT_CORRUPTED_GOTO at line 4653 of file /usr/src/packages/BUILD/kernel-desktop-2.6.31.12/linux-2.6.31/fs/xfs/xfs_bmap.c. XFS driver complains that the filesystem is corrupted (extent tree block
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566288
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566288#c20
Jan Kara