🚀 go-pugleaf

Felix Karpfen wrote:
> On 2008-06-21, "Robert Swan" swan.r.l@gmail.com <"Robert Swan"> wrote:
> 
>> Can be a challenge finding where these things are documented, but
>> "file" is often helpful when trying to work out what a file is.
>>
>> And it's not good to be finding things in lost+found.  That indicates
>> some level of file system corruption
> 
> Alas - that was indeed the case.
> 
> I had a major crash. And my file system was corrupted very badly.
> It is still unclear why it happened; but all is fixed now (apart
> from the files in "lost+found") and I refrain from spelling out the
> details.  However, I would have been history, if I had not had a backup
> fully-operational (Linux) system on my box from which to repair the
> corrupted disk partition.

Was it an ext3 file system?


> Thank you for the advice and the pointer to the "file" command. The
> output of the "file" command reads:
> 
> [felixk@ ~]$ file 75584621
> 75584621: ERROR: cannot open `75584621' (No such file or directory)
> 
> - which is probably just another indication that I was in big trouble!

Maybe, maybe not. Anything that gets moved to Lost+Found is likely to be 
only part of a file that's become disembodied from the rest of it and 
the original directory entry. So depending on what the original file 
was, it's sometimes possible to recover useful data.

Although, that's really only likely to be useful if it's a text file or 
a sound file or some format where one part on its own could make sense. 
Part of a book could still save a lot of writing, and part of a recorded 
interview could be useful. Part of a photo or part of an executable is 
probably going to be totally useless!

Have you tried opening them with a text editor?

> I assume thaat I can safely delete the entries in "lost+found" since 
> everything works again and none of the entries appear to be missed.

If you can't open them with a text editor they're probably not going to 
be any use anyway. But it might not do any harm to hang onto them for a 
while, as sometimes you don't realise something missing for ages.


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