file system crash

[Greg Kedrovsky]

I wonder if someone might know (from the description below) what I did.
It's a FUBAR, so I've cleaned it up and am reconstructing as best I can
from back-ups (I suck - absolutely suck - at making decent, orderly,
regular back-ups). 

Yesterday, after rebooting my machine into Linux, I got an error message
that /dev/hdb1 (mount point /home) had errors, and that I was to run
fsck manually to fix them. That I did. It took quite a bit of time, and
some of the errors returned to me were as follows: 

 Error reading bloc 720903 (Attempt to read block from filesystem
 resulted in short read) while doing scan. 

    It asked if I wanted to ignore the error. I chose the default yes.
    Then it asked if I wanted to force a rewrite. Again, default yes.

 Entry '1071210096.179_265.gregkedro:2,s" in ??? (3408005) has
 deleted/unused inode 7536726.

    It asked to clear it, and I chose the default yes.

 Unconnected directory inode errors...

 Unattached inode errors...

After a while I got tired of jotting down the different error messages
it was giving me.

When it was all said and done, my greg directory under /home did not
exist, and my lost+found was enormous. 

The only weird thing I saw during this whole process (actually after it
was all done and I cleaned up my vomit) was that in my fstab, my
/dev/hdb1 was set to mount as ext2. I distinctly remember making ext3
filesystems when I installed Slack a long time ago. Would a virus or a
script kiddie that changed ext3 to ext2 cause something like this?

And, please, no comments on back-ups. I have files spread out over my
whole stinkin network, and it's been a nightmare trying to figure out a
good way to back up. I think I'm going to have to consolidate all my
files out on the server, and go from there with archived (untouched)
files and current files to be backed up regularly. 

But the question I have is: What in the world happened? I'm used to
stuff like this from Windows, but not with Linux. I'm hurt...

-Greg

-- 
Mutt 1.4.1i on Slackware 9.1 Linux
Curridabat, San Jose, Costa Rica
http://www.greg-and-sue.com/screenshot.jpg
Yahoo Instant Messenger ID: gregkedro