Major league corruption - anyone seen anything like this?

[Fernando Pérez]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
> 
> I realized that might be an issue on my way home.  This is on my development
> machine.  I (user == skip) do have write access to /usr/local/*.  Sorry
> about the missing info.

Still strange. A couple of questions: 

- what filesystem are you using?
- are all the files which get corrupted files that get explicitly open by
your crashing process?

Just yesterday my Mandrake laptop refused to boot because a locked-up
suspend (apm -s) event crapped on /etc/fstab. Not pretty at all. It took
some creative games to bring it back to life. The culprit had been the
pcmcia process trying to modify /etc/fstab to de-register a flash card,
since the suspend calls pcmcia, the file was open for writing when the
lockup happened. I user reiserfs, which logs filesystem meta-data but not
user data, so that didn't save me. I give you this background in case you
can spot some similarities with your situation.

Cheers,

f