Re: Scrambled Files

[Kuba Ober <kuba@mareimbrium.org>]

> > >2. Is the corruption in any way deterministic? For example, does
> > >  it only affect files that have been modified since the last
> > >  sync, or perhaps files that are in the process of being modified
> > >  at the time the system goes down?
>
> In my case it seemed to affect file that were either 1) recently written
> (probably in cache somewhere) 2) being written.
>
> For example, apt-get was messing around with xfs when it died.  xfs was
> completely hosed, as were a bunch of things related to X.  However, the
> files were hosed with completely non-deterministic contents - german
> text, what appeared to be UUEncoded binaries, random data, as well as
> some kind of regular-looking data.  It wasn't like a bunch of the writes
> got crossed and files ended up backwards.  It also wasn't like random
> junk was written.

What you see might be a result of metadata corruption rather than file 
contents corruption. The metadata might be pointing to astray places, which 
are either used or unused-but-previously-written-to places on the drive. It 
may even be that the data from original files is sitting there intact.

As a side note: did you try fsck'ing the filesystem?

Cheers,
Kuba