Help! My hard drive ate itself!

[Hal Pacino]

Um, so I was compiling my list of songs in gtkpod and everything else began to behave slowly. I had epiphany, rhythmbox, xmms, and nautilus open. I closed xmms, which took a sec. I needed to look up a phone number so I tried to open evolution. This seemed to be taking forever. Evolution was not opening. To save memory I tried to close epiphany. This took so long I ended up opening the system monitor to kill the epiphany process. Then the system monitor took a while to close. Thinking that having rhtythmbox open and reading the same directories of songs might be adding to my system's slowness, I tried to close rhythmbox. No such luck. I waited. I ctrl-alt-Backspaced. I ctrl-alt-Backspaced again, and again. I tried to select different consoles to get a top by ctrl-alt-f1, ctrl-alt-f2, ctrl-alt-f3, ctrl-alt-f4, ctrl-alt-f5, ctrl-alt-f6... all to no avail. I tried to reopen the system monitor. Nothing happened. Evolution was still not open.

In frustration, I reset my computer. And my hard drive at itself.

Upon rebooting, my system informed me that I should run fsck. So I did. All sorts of inodes were not attached to files. Counts were reset from 2 to 1. Directories disappeared (including a Stevie Wonder album!). Many files to be put in lost+found. In short I jsut pressed enter to give the default answer of yes to the questions it posed.

Now I'm righting on a system that can't emerge, because gcc and perl don't work. I can't login though gdm, because I'm missing the gtk+2.4 directory. I have some stuff in the lost+found (but still a lot of stuff appears to be gone for good).

This has actually happened once before (on ext3, never on ext2, or reiser or other filesystems I've used), but only when my partition was running near full. The other time, I'm pretty sure it happened without me having reset the computer, without a crash situation, the hd jsut started eating itself for shits and giggles.

Anyway, I'm running an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (300 MHz bus)
256MB DDR ram (running at 400 bus)
I have a Maxtor 40BGB drive with a /boot partition and a / partition of 37G
I have 3G swap.
The motherboard is an ASUStek. I forget the model number, but if it really helps I'll look it up.

Anyway, my first question is WTF?
My next question(s) is(are): what do I do to get my system back? Is there an automated way to reinstall lost+found files? How will I know what other critical system files I might be missing? How do I get gcc back (I obviously can't emerge it)?
Finally: How do I prevent this from happening? In the rare situation that my computer totally freezes this seems a little harsh for the filesystem to freak out so much, perhaps there are other factors that caused this....

Thanks so much for your help everyone.

[alsh]

Wow.. well it is probably a good idea to boot the gentoo cd and do a full filesystem check with the utilites on it.

As far as portage just search the forums for portage rescue and that should always be able to get you a working copy of portage back to be able to use... Preventing it in the future is kinda an I don't know. Maybe this is a sign that your harddrive is slowly wanting to die? Not sure as I have been lucky on filesystem corruption, only had it happen on a reiserfs disk before and under somewhat similar circumstances (hard reboot).

It just seems really odd that stuff like that could start happening... I would suspect the harddrive. You said your memory is running at 400 bus, is that overclocked at all? I have had very bad experiences before in linux trying to overclock memory.

Owell hard to help as it is somewhat of a wtf situation. If you want to throw out more details here and there we can start guessing But i'm sure others will have different ideas.

[WarpFlyght]

Ouch, that's a pretty sudden and catastrophic failure. I'd recommend checking the hard disk before moving any further forward. You could be dealing with a problem with the disk itself.

A great package for checking your disk is app-sys/smartmontools. (Since you stated you can't emerge, try a Gentoo LiveCD or a Knoppix disc -- I'm fairly sure the Gentoo LiveCDs have smartmontools onboard, and I know Knoppix does.)

The program that can help you check your disk is smartctl. You'll need to run it as root. The first thing to try:

[dushkin]

Ate itself? Hmm...
Your drive seems hungry, do you feed it often?

Anyways, I think you should just install Gentoo once again and avoid doing what you did.
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[WarpFlyght]

If the hard disk is sound, the system should be salvageable, so there's probably no need to reinstall the OS simply for that unless it would just be easier to do so. I don't know everything that would need to be done to repair it, but there are surely people who do, and hopefully they'll chime in.
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