Amish Mehta (Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2001 7:53 AM) keys in:
when I checked lost+found there were around 1200 files of size 4GB(HD space is 8GB). 'ls -l' doesnt show type of the file(it shows '?' question mark) I try to remove those files it says but that too fails.
I remember such an instance which happened with me last year. I was using TurboLinux 6.0 and it had one of those 2.2.13/5/7 kernels.
/lost+found also shows several block and character devices So what are theses files? How do I remove these files?
I didn't get a messed up /lost+found, but I did get character/block devices in my data-directories. The file names are probably just placeholders. You will need a filesystem guru to attempt recovering data from that.
does it mean I have lost the files? What files were lost? How do I find?
Yes. You _have_ lost files amounting to the extra free space which you are observing.
suprisingly all daily operations seem to be working fine.
You haven't mentioned if you have separate partitions such as /usr /var, but that can be safely assumed, I guess. As long as you are not using any data/executables/libraries/whatever from the partition which is corrupted, you won't notice any change in daily operations.
To summarize, there has been some amazing screw-up somewhere in the filesystem data-structures. e2fsck wouldn't be able to find any inconsistency with it even if you run it again. So, the best thing you can do is to take a backup of whatever data you still have on the partition, format it and then reuse it.
If possible, get the latest stable kernel version (2.4.16?) and use it. :-)