What happened to /home?

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:01:11 -0800, Rem P Roberti <remegius at comcast.net> wrote:
> Today I booted my laptop and discovered that /home was gone.  Well...not
> exactly..but for all intents and purposes.  The system isn't seeing it
> although I can see it when I cd to /.  But if I try and cd to /home from
> there the system tells me "home:Not a directory." 


> What happened, and
> what can I do about it?

Do some diagnostics. First, check inode, using the ls -i
command both for the symlink /home and its target /usr/home.
Then use

	fdsb -i /dev/ad0s1a

(or the proper device) and use "inode n" (with n = the inode
number you discovered by the ls commands above) to check the
information.

Finally, but that may be risky, run fsck on all partitions
that could be affected (e. g. if /home is on ad0s1a, but
home data is on ad0s1h).

I still have a problem like you described: I cannot cd to
my home directory (/home/poly) with the same error message.
The problem is: The home directories inode information is
gone. It is still mentioned in the higher level inode (/home),
but the inode this entry is pointing to isn't existing.
Furthermore, all files inside this directory, at least those
at the next lower level, refer to the inode with the
"back-pointer", which references an inode non-existing.

If any symlinks are involved, check them. Check "file x"
(with x = the directory name) to see what it is.

I hope you won't see something like

        % cd mnt/poly
        mnt/poly: Not a directory.

        % file mnt/poly
        mnt/poly: cannot open `mnt/poly' (Bad file descriptor)

Do you have the Midnight Commander installed? If your
/home line is given red color and preceded by a "?",
size 0, and dated Jan 1 1970, then... well... it indicates
a problem some way similar to mine...



Good luck!

I hope you have good backups. That's not an impolite joke.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...