Hello Friends. I am new to OpenBSD (but not to Unixes), my experience with this OS is only a month. I was getting more an more confortable with the OS, and getting in love with it, but today I have experienced a very weird and strange thing.
My OpenBSD testing system is installed on the second IDE disk (1GB). I was enjoying on a happy X-window fluxbox session. I installed "links" WEB browser package with pkg_add -v ftp://..... , as usual. I was surfing the net sometime (ppp connection). I stopped the WEB browser and opened an xterm window, in order to search for certain man page. I was surprised because I could not see any man page! The error was something like: "/etc/man.conf/ Not a directory". I stopped the X-window session and attempted to enter at the console. I was not able to do it. I seemed that /etc/ directory suffered some kind of damage. Login: root Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio login: cannot stat /etc/login.conf: Not a directory Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio passwd: /etc/pwd.db: Not a directory. Login incorrect Login: and so on. I started thinking that something serious could have happened, but I trusted on a reboot. I rebooted the system and it prompted for single user mode (I do not know if this is the right word, I called it like that on Linux). I ran and #fsck /dev/wd1a and it discovered plenty of errors in the /etc/ directory and some other directories. It created a lost+found with the found garbage...... After the cleaning, I rebooted again, but the /etc/ directory was wiped out. Also /var/ directory dissapeared. I have searched for /var/log/* information on the lost+found directory but no luck. Luckyly, this system is only a system for fun. ;-). What could cause this disaster? Please, feel free to ask me for any information that you need before I wipe the entire disk and install a fresh OpenBSD again. Thank you very much for your time. Ramiro.
