[plug] OOPS!

[Beau Kuiper]

I suggest:

1) move to runlevel 1

2) remount your root directory as read-only

ie

mount / -o ro,remount

3) run fsck on the root directory partition. Allow it to fix everything.

4) remount your root directory back to read-write

mount / -o rw,remount

5) hopefully your missing files and directories will be sitting in

/lost+found

6) you need to identify each file/directory in lost+found, as they are given as
inode numbers, and move them back into your root directory. Make sure
permissions and ownership of the files if sane. Remember

chmod 700 /root
chmod 777 /tmp
chmod +t /tmp

Hopefully this will get you on the road to recovery. If this doesn't work, you
may need to get a resuce disk, boot from it and sort out your root directory
from the rescure disk.

I had a similar problem when I placed a very old hard drive with my new one.
The new one got corrupted, need to be sorted out.

Still crispy
Beau Kuiper
kuiperba at cs.curtin.edu.au

On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Brian Tombleson wrote:
> Seeking urgent help and/or verification.
> 
> I seem to have lost the contents of my root directory.
> 
> 'ls /' returns no files and on the terminal screen I get the error:
> 
> EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,1)): ext2_readdir: bad entry in directory #2:
> directory entry across blocks - offset=0; inode=1166739463, rec_len=35084,
> name_len=16
> 
> I can 'ls /bin' and all the contents are there, it is referencing all my
> directories correctly, just not the root.
> 
> I'm tempted to re-boot to see if it will fix it, but I was wondering if
> anyone can tell me if this is easily recoverable without me having to
> re-start from scratch?
> 
> TA
> Brian.