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[Rashkae]

Wade Smart wrote:
> 20090218 2103 GMT-5
> 
> Crap!!!! My system keeps weirding out on me.
> 
> I just rebooted my system after I couldnt get a thumbdrive icon off the 
> screen after unmounting it. Now all my documents I have written in the 
> past five days are gone. All my html files, all my php files - anything 
> I have worked on is missing - EXCEPT my email. It is all here.
> 
> I have tried running a search on file names and nothing comes up.
> 
> How can this happen?
> 
> Wade

One hell of a filesystem bug, or the hard drive was just unable to write
to the file hard drive sectors needed to update the meta data.  Linux,
will, unfortunately, keep going for a long time with an unstable hard
drive, and the only indidicator that anything is wrong will be in the
dmesg log.. (although, 5 days is kind of long, even for that.)

I would start with the basic Memtest86 from the Install CD.  All bets
are off if you get errors from that.  Then use smartctl -a to check the
hard drive self diagnostic error report.  What you are most interested
in here is either Reallocated Sectors, or any record whose "Worst"
Number is lower than the "Thresh" number.  (Note: while hard drive
manufacturers might consider it 'normal' to acquire a few re-allocated
sectors, this is one of your best early indications of a failing hard
drive.  Certainly a drive that increases this count more than once
should be disposed of as soon as possible).

If the Hard drive hasn't already declared itself dead, then you should
use badblocks to scan the surface.  Since this computer has already
exhibited such hostile symptoms, I would (after a backup of my data, of
course) boot from a CD and do a non-destructive read write test.  This
is slow, but it's as good as doing a Low Level Format of your hard
drive, and has the benefit of preserving all your data if the HD isn't a
failure.  This should be followed with another look at smartctl to make
sure the hard drive hasn't re-allocated sectors silently during the
read-write test.  (Technically, that's what the HD should do if any of
the sectors are iffy, but I would still consider it a warning sign of
imminent danger.)