Tons of files in /lost+found

[lzapp]

Hi everyone,

I rebooted one of my machines and after it made me do a manual fsck, almost nothing works and there are ton of files in /lost+found. I'm told that the user on this machine went to great pains to get it configured just the way he wanted.

Can anyone suggest how I can recover without wiping the disk and doing a new install?

Thanks.

[stevea]

Files end up in lost&found when fsck finds allocted files without corresponding directory
entries. This only happens after some sort of file system damage.

You might look at the files(by content) and see if you ca nfigure out where they came from ...
what they are:
file /mnt/lost+found/*
is a starting point.

[techmatt]

Sounds to me there is a HD problem, may want to just gat a new drive and start over.

[lzapp]

Unfortunately the file command doesn't work. libz.so is missing. I think it must be one of the detached files. I've searched /lost+found for a matching inode number (from other machines of the same OS) and can't find it.

[lzapp]

I'm guessing the same thing about bad HD.

Okay, beers all around.

[techmatt]

about time