On 8 June 2010 10:47, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: > On Mon, 7 Jun 2010 23:46:19 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> Neil is likely correct - filesystem corruption. A quick easy way to >> check is to run ls -al starting with the target then going up on >> directory in turn. If you start getting lots of "???" in the output, >> corruption is almost certain. > > Paul's suggestion of running lsof may be valid too. If a process had a > lock n a file that was then deleted, the file wouldn't show up in ls but > would prevent the directory being deleted until the lock was released. > > If you don't want to mess around with lsof and tracking down the process, > a reboot will solve that one.
It seems that the fs was well and truly corrupted. :-( I looked carefully for ????? output of ls -la, which is a sure warning something went sideways with the fs, but unfortunately I couldn't find anything wrong. I have tried throughout the day to recover my machine to no avail. I downloaded gcc ebuild and sources from a snapshot and recompiled it using a live cd. The same file problem as reported above arose at least twice. I have so far run fsck three times - everytime it seems to fix the error and then I can delete the rogue directories. Now tell me, is it possible that each time the fs corrupts itself in the same manner - i.e. at the /var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/... ? I found that /, /var and /usr/portage were corrupted. Each one on its own separate partition. Each one on a reiser4 type fs ... Smartmontools doesn't show any failures/errors. Is reiser4 prone to corruption? Thankfully my home partition and a large data partition both on reiser4 are OK. -- Regards, Mick
