. and .. directories missing

[Aram Khalili]

Hello,

I'm having some trouble with FreeBSD on my T20 ThinkPad.  There is a
problem with the hard disk that prevents me from booting into
multi-user mode.  I'm not exactly sure what the problem is; fsck
reports many hundreds of errors on the /usr & /home partitions, claims
to fix those, but doesn't.  If I run fsck back to back, the same errors
show up.  When I reboot after fsck, it does attempt to boot (since
filesystems are marked clean) but panic, and fails to sync 1 buffer. 
Not sure which one, but it's always 1 buffer.  I'm also not entirely
sure what caused this problem  to occur, but right before when it
occurred I was doing a massive portupgrade -rR of many things, and many
(but not all) of the disk problems seem to be in the /usr/ports tree.

Now to the things that I do know:  I suddenly have many directories,
particularly under /usr/ports, that do not have the normal . and ..
entries.  I also cannot rmdir or rm -rf them, because it says they're
not empty (except they're as empty as I've seen, ls -al returns no
lines).  Why would that occur.  Is there a way to put them back in?
Could I ln . to what, maybe .?  and ln .. to the parent directory?

Anybody have any ideas as to what could have occurred or what I can do
to fix the problem?  I have downloaded, burned & booted the excellent
FreeSBIE disk and I can mount and access the hard disk partitions that
way.  Also, the install CDs mention a repair disk in their install
menu, that I couldn't find images for.  Instead I used FreeSBIE.

I was tracking STABLE (4.10) and had done an update & rebuild of the
system about 10 days ago.

-aram


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail