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In a previous message, Rick Friedman wrote:
On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 12:54, John Pettigrew wrote:
I have some files that I cannot delete, even as root. I had the same sort of problem a couple of months ago. I was unable to delete some files even as root.
It turned out, I had developed a problem with the filesystem on that particular partition.
Bingo - I also use reiserfs, so I ran reiserfsck --check followed by --rebuild-tree (which I was told to do by the check). Judging by the number of errors (lost+found has hundreds of directories in it), there was some serious trouble with this disk. Indeed, this process has completely trashed my system - it won't boot completely, with lots of failed services, and it won't accept any logins (just says "Login incorrect" at the username stage). I'm going to have to reformat and reinstall, and hope that my backups will be OK despite the corruption on the primary disk. I'm rather troubled by this. I thought that the point of a journalled FS was that this sort of nastiness didn't happen, and was at least kept infrequent and small-scale? I see fsck as part of the boot process of this box every day (it's a desktop system), so why hasn't this taken care of problems as they arise? Also, how can I keep an eye out and stop this happening in the future, or at least spot it early? John -- John Pettigrew Headstrong Games john@headstrong-games.co.uk Fun : Strategy : Price http://www.headstrong-games.co.uk/ Board games that won't break the bank Valley of the Kings: ransack an ancient Egyptian tomb but beware of mummies!