fsck finding thousands of errors
I helped someone install Debian on a new hard drive a couple months ago.
They didn't use that hard drive for the last couple months, then tried to
boot into Debian and got the following errors during the boot process:
--------------------------------------------------
mount: mountpoint /proc is not a directory
...
(swap activates successfully)
...
/dev/hdb1 contains a filesystem with errors, check forced.
(fixes several inodes)
Inode ________ has magic flag set
unexpected inconsistency, run fsck manually, without -a or -p options.
--------------------------------------------------
So I get him to boot off an install CD as a rescue disk, since /dev/hdb1 is
the root filesystem. He runs e2fsck /dev/hdb1 from the emergency shell, and
it starts correcting THOUSANDS of inodes, hitting enter one by one. The
types of messages that e2fsck reports are:
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-Inode has illegal blocks
-Illegal block in Inode
-Too many illegal blocks in Inodes
-Inode has compression flag set on file sysstem without compression support
-Inode ________ is in use, but has dtime set
-Inode ________ has magic flag set
-Special (device/socket/fifo/symlink) file (inode ________) has append-only
flag set
_______ has immutable or append-only flag set
-Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found
-Inode _______ was part of an orphaned inode list
-Gal block 6 in inode _______
---------------------------------------------------
inodes are in the range of 1,030,000 and he corrected about 5,000 of them
one-by-one before I said to give up.
There is also a fat32 partition on this hard drive which had files on it,
which are no longer being read by the windows half of the machine.
The partition table seems to be undamaged.
He doesn't think he's done anything damaging to this hard drive, or even used
it since the last time it was working.
Do you know what's wrong with this hard drive, or how to troubleshoot it?
It's almost brand new, but is it a warranty item?
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