Re: missing /var/mail

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 12:20:03PM -0500, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I know that this is pretty useless, but.
>
> I was just reading my mail when the power went out. There were some
> important mails there. At the time, they were in /var/mail/dtutty
>
> On reboot, it said that it was replaying the journal (ext3) for /var
> with no errors reported.
>
> After reboot, /var/mail/dtutty is empty (another user's mail is still
> there, the only differece being that they weren't using mutt at the
> time).
>
> There is nothing in lost+found.
>
> ...

Don't know exactly what happened in your case, but I recently had some corruption in /var/log. The first hint was that some programs wouldn't run because /var was read-only. Typing "mount" revealed all file systems as rw. A look at /var/log showed most of it gone. fsck claimed the fs was ok and didn't do anything, obviously the superblock marker had not been reset. Rebooting caused more problems as a lot of system software tries to write to /var/log. It even got to the point of a kernel panic. Rebooting the recovery kernel, I ended up in single user mode. Then, after unmounting /var, I had to do a forced fsck. Lots of trouble was reported but in the end the FS was fixed. Looking at /var/log then, everything was back. Ext3 with its journals and all is pretty good! I had one partial text (log) file in lost+found and later I found I had to manually fix a few dpkg files and force-uninstall and reinstall some packages. I was doing an aptitude upgrade at the time of the problem.

So, try a forced fsck of /var in single-user mode and hopefully it will bring back your lost directory.

A.

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