Help! Hard disk problems

[Anthony M. Agelastos]

On Jan 2, 2006, at 10:31 AM, Anthony M. Agelastos wrote:

>
> On Jan 1, 2006, at 11:28 PM, Anthony M. Agelastos wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> In doing some routine items on my FreeBSD box, it started behaving  
>> oddly. I rebooted and to my surprise, I started receiving many  
>> messages displaying information regarding that /usr has issues. It  
>> puts me directly into single user mode and tells me to run fsck  
>> manually. When I run fsck all by itself, here is what it tells me:
>>
>> ** /dev/ad0s1f
>> ** Last Mounted on /usr
>> ** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
>> UNKNOWN FILE TYPE I=496000
>> UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY
>>
>> CLEAR? [yn]
>>
>> This is the first time that I have ever run fsck and I have no  
>> idea what this message means or what the best course of action on  
>> CLEAR to take. Any input at all would be greatly appreciated  
>> (FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE if it helps). Thank you all so much for your  
>> assistance.
>>
>> -Anthony
>>
>>
> After not getting any feedback, I decided to do
>
> fsck -y
>
> This returned my machine to usable. Before doing this while I was  
> just hitting "y" to the questions I did not understand, one of them  
> mentioned that it had to create a lost+found directory and after a  
> while that the directory was out of space. It asked me the question  
> to expand. So, I hit yes. Anyways, after all is said and done, that  
> filesystem has 500MB of more free space than it did before (it  
> doesn't take into account the fact that /usr/src is now empty and  
> the size of lost+found). What does the expand option do? Can I  
> safely delete lost+found? Like I mentioned before, this is my first  
> time in going through these types of issues and I have not found  
> any documentation that I can fully understand on fsck and what it  
> does. In any event, thank you all for your assistance.
>
Also, what methods are there in backtracking what the cause of the  
errors could have been? How can I tell if there is something wrong  
with the hard disk (bad blocks that cannot be used anymore, etc.)? I  
suppose what I intend to gather by these questions is if this drive  
can still be trusted, or if I should start looking at getting a new  
one. Any insight would be appreciated.