🚀 go-pugleaf

Felix Karpfen wrote:
> On 2008-06-23, Will Kemp <will@xxxx.swaggie.net> wrote:
>> 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 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?
> 
> I use the XFS file system.

I'm glad to hear it wasn't an ext3 one! ;-)

Why do you use xfs?

> And discovered "/sbin/xfs_repair" which appears to have repaired most
> of the damage.
> 
> A few socket files ended up in "lost+found";

Ah, but are they *really* socket files? It seems fairly unlikely. The 
thing about lost+found is that what ends up there are generally 
disembodied segments of files - and if it's a disembodied segment, the 
filesystem's got no way of knowing what sort of file it is. Therefore, i 
can't see how the "s" in the flags can signify the they're "socket" 
files - as the filesystem can't know that and it's the filesystem that's 
set the flags.

> and there was about 2
> minutes of cleanup activity that flashed across the screen [and was not
> saved for inspection :-(]. The XFS-log was also corrupted; I had to
> overwrite it with zeros (as instructed by an xfs_repair message) before
> xfs_repair did its things.
> 
> The text files in "lost+found" are a total mystery. They have
> accumulated over a period of 2 years and appear to be either emails or
> downloaded web-pages.  I never knew that any of the entries had been
> lost :-(.

That's a bit of a worry. If it was me, i'd be abandoning xfs and 
changing to ext3! As it's not me, i'm just glad i use ext3 and not xfs! ;-)

I've haven't found anything in lost+found for many years - and certainly 
never since starting to use ext3 rather than ext2.

> One other mystery remains. My HD has 6 partitions and some unformatted
> space.  My current OS is on one partition and my backup OS on a second
> partition. The other partitions are a swap partition and two small
> XFS partitions that I had created in the distant past and filled with
> (backup?) contents that I can no longer recall (I now use a separate
> HD for my backups!). "cfdisk" displays the starts and ends of these
> partitions and "xfs_repair says that the file-systems are perfectly
> healthy.  But I can no longer "mount" them and inspect their content.
> The "mount" command claims that the mount points do no exist.  Since I
> cannot even remember any more what data is in these partitions, it is a
> non-issue that I can no longer mount them.
> 
> But I worry about such mysteries and therefore thought them worth a
> mention.

I think you're right to worry about it. I'd be worried too.

>> 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.
> 
> I propose to move them to "/opt", leave  "/lost+found" empty and watch
> for anything else that ends up there in future.

Good idea.



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