[clue-tech] I/O Error when attempting to remove an empty (corrupt?)

[Jim Ockers]

Hi William,

I need some more information to assist with this, but I love 
this kind of problem. :)

William wrote:
> 
> List,
> 
> I am unable to destroy a broken directory on my file system 
> (RHEL/CentOS4).  The following is a screen capture of the problem at work:
> 
> [root at kenshin ~]# cd /mnt/broken
> [root at kenshin broken]# dir
> total 16
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Feb  7 14:42 .
> drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 4096 Feb  9 09:59 ..
> ?---------  ? ?    ?       ?            ? dnszones
> [root at kenshin broken]# rm -rf dnszones
> rm: cannot lstat `dnszones': Input/output error
> 
> I broke this directory when I attempted to mount it to a samba share on 
> another (Windows NT 4) machine.  While the logon I used should have 
> worked, it did not and I am unable to recover.

I'm not sure I understand.  Did you use smbmount or 
mount -t smbfs or what command did you use to mount it?

Can you reboot in singleuser mode and fsck the filesystem?  
What kind of filesystem is /mnt/broken on?  I'm assuming 
ext2 or ext3.

Are there any kernel error messages from the hard disk
device on which this filesystem lives?  Run dmesg | less
and troll through there looking for IDE errors or disk
errors from your disk.  If you don't see anything have a
look at /var/log/messages.

Of course if you still want help with this issue then please
post your findings from dmesg with your next message to the
list.

Then please reboot and fsck -f the filesystem.

Then run the following commands in sequence and post the 
output to the list, in the same manner as you did above.
Note that dumpe2fs might output a lot of information. :)

/bin/ls -ald /mnt/broken
/bin/ls -ald /mnt/broken/dnszones
/usr/bin/lsattr -d /mnt/broken/dnszones
/bin/mount
/bin/df /mnt/broken
/bin/df /mnt/broken/dnszones
/sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hdd1  (or whatever the device name is for 
 the filesystem on which /mnt/broken resides)

> I have tried stopping smb before issuing the rm -- no change.  I have 
> tried remounting the share (with smb running) to no avail.  At this 
> point, I just want this broken directory off my HDD.

It seems most likely to me that the filesystem is corrupt
and fsck will fix it.  If the filesystem is corrupt perhaps
a likely culprit is an actual disk i/o error.  If you have
IDE-SMART installed can you see if SMART is indicating any
errors?

Hope this helps,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/
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