On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 03:34:34PM +0200, Ramiro Aceves wrote: > 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. >
hello, The last year a had similar problems because of a bad IDE cable. In few hours there were randomly corrupted files, but no disk error messages in the log. Finally a changed the cable and installed a fresh OpenBSD. regards, -- Alexandre
