[svlug] hard drive errors and now lost files with ext3fs

[Daevid Vincent]

i came home today to see that my (fairly stock) RH7.2 box was only
responding to pings and nothing else.

i rebooted and it made me fsck manually. i typed 'y' to all the prompts for
whacky inodes and stuff.

it "fixed" or "cleared" a lot of stuff and then rebooted and worked
normally.

however, some of my files are missing now. this is an ext3fs, and i guess i
was under the impression that the benefit of that was to prevent loss of
this magnitude. in fact, i can't ever recall loosing data when i used ext2fs
back with RH6 and things got screwy.

is there something i'm missing here? is there a 'lost+found' area that has
my files for recovery? is there a way to get them back? don't say check your
backups -- some of the files were created since the last backup last night.

*sigh*