Root partition on ext3 totally damaged (total frustration)

From: Massimiliano Adamo (maxadamo_at_iol.it)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:15:04 +0200

Hi all.

Yesterday I have shutdown Linux, without having any problem.
Today I went to boot the machine, but I'was asked for root password, for
maintenance reasons, on the root partition.
It was a long time, that I didn't see this prompt, so I tought: it will
be for the ususals 4 files damaged .....
The filesystem is EXT3 (I hate that days when I decided to move to ext3).

fsck says immediately that there are thousands of file damaged, and I
have to use "-p" option to autocorrect, but there are too many
incosistences and "-p" doesn't work. I try "-y" and it works fine.
I wait for all operations to be finished, I reboot the system, and the
system doesn't restart anymore (init not found and so on. before reboot
I understood that there were thousands of file damaged: libraries and
lot of binaries).

What can I do?

I could decide to never use EXT3 for the rest of my days, but that's not
the point.

The point is that the system is not liable at all and this a very bad
news: I never saw a problem like that, even with FAT32 in Windows 95!

Again: what can I do now?
for a short time I have used XFS (from Irix), and it looked to be nice,
but kernel compilation with patches and support were not that nice.

I could use JFS or reiser .... but, be honest with me: if you encounter
a problem like that, will you still entrust the system that you are using?

ciao,
Massimiliano

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