Arch Linux

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Suddenly, my config files vanish and my binaries stop working

Earlier this evening, I had just quit Vega Strike and was about to do some stuff in a terminal when I discovered that gnome-terminal wouldn't start. Neither would gnome-system-monitor, or any other application that wasn't already running. On logging out, I found that X couldn't remain on, and kept crashing only to have GDM restart it.

Upon rebooting, my system claimed that no groups existed, and none of my daemons were able to start. Fortunately, basic stuff like cat and ls worked, so I was able to discover that /etc/group, /etc/rc.conf, and other config files had disappeared. Unfortunately, vi and a bunch of other stuff - basically anything in /usr/bin - didn't work.

I booted using the Arch install CD and ran e2fsck on my home partition; no bad blocks were found, but a bunch of errors were, and five files were recovered and put in lost+found. One of them turned out to be rc.conf (complete and undamaged), I'm not sure what the others are yet.

So, it looks like it's safe to keep using this machine... But before I do, I'd like to ask, has anyone here ever seen anything like this?

- Could it have been the heat? It was 90+ degrees F today, and although my laptop's temperature monitors didn't get tripped, I wonder if the HDD could have overheated.

- Or is my hard drive dying? This doesn't seem likely to me given the lack of bad sectors, but it's possible and not pleasant to consider.

In a sentence - seeing as my HDD seems undamaged but my filesystem most certainly wasn't, and given the rather bizarre circumstances around this happening, what's my best course of action?