fsck "recovers" ext4 data that reappears after reboot
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| linux (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I just had a really strange behavior here that is really hard to describe and find a summary for:
I bootet my computer, fsck told me my /home's ext4 partition was corrupt. It ask me whether to recover myself or automatically. I had it recover automatically. It did so, the desktop bootet and soon I found out: my pidgin config, my latest firefox bookmarks, my evolution config was gone / broken. And all the files I had created yesterday were gone, too. My lost+found folder was filled with gconf xml files and firefox cache files (flash apples, images, css, ...). I'm not sure whether all the files broken / gone were there but at least I found some that were promising (for example my evolution config).
So I copied the lost+found and tried to recover my files. There were lots of files and after a while I thought: Well, maybe fsck can do something here for me, let's reboot in single user mode and run fsck manually on the /home partition.
I did so and fsck said everything was clean. I forced a check, but still no issues. I was disappointed because I thought I had to recover my lost files from lost+found myself, so I mounted /home and finished the boot.
And then I found out: Everything was ok again! Nothing is missing, all files are back where they were! My latest created files, my configs, ... Everything works fine again! But all the things I have done trying to recover my "lost" files were undone.
What happend here!? Did anyone have the same bug in the past? Any explainations? This bug is really really strange!
(I backupped all the /var/log when all the files were back - what do you need?)
| 10111 (joachim-neu) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in linux (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Invalid |
I consider this mystical solved, please mark the bug report as invalid.
What happened? I have 2 harddrives, one spare where I sometimes dd-copy my first harddrive to. I did this the first time after my ubuntu 10.04 install the day before yesterday. With two harddrives being identically, their UUIDs were so too and bootloader and kernel decided to use the wrong one (the first time where my data disappeared) and the right one (the time where my data reappeared). Which one the kernel chose was quite random and not visible during boot so I didn't realize it was working on the wrong drive. That's all.