I am using the EXT3 file system. Today, I powered on the machine and went into the other room for a few minutes while it booted up. When I came back, it turned out that it had come time for an fsck on the disk and the disk was so corrupted that it couldn't be mounted in rw mode. I had to log in to non-grapchicakl mode and run e2fsck on the disk. It was so corrupted that, after repairing a few sectors (or whatever those low level repair operations apply to) it said there was so much corruption that it had to repair an entire inode. It eventually repaired everything and I was able to boot back up. Normally, when there is a problem of this nature, the errors are fixed on the fly and the boot process just continues with a normal log in. I thought EXT3 was able to do that via its journal in all cases. I used to get hit with this problem quite often under EXT2, but never under EXT3. Is this unusual that EXT3 couldn't recover the disk without me having to run e2fsck? Also, I looked at lost+found and didn't see anything in there so can I assume that everything was recovered, or would I have lost data in this instance? This, hopefully, will be a very rare occurrence, or even better, never recurring. Normally I would expect this sort of corruption to occur only when the OS is abnormally terminated, though it could indicate a failing drive or power supply, or some even more nefarious problem with the

On 30/10/06 19:41, Greg Wallace wrote: mainboard itself. The problem is probably akin to a corrupted FAT in a Windows system, which is usually (relatively) easily recoverable only if the FAT copy is intact (Billy was at least sufficiently wide awake when designing FAT to make sure there is a duplicate copy). Just be thankful you did recover everything (as indicated by the lack of anything in lost+found), and hope it never happens again. Out of curiosity, though, do you recall the circumstances of the last shutdown prior to that reboot?