FileSystem Corruption 1,493,339 and counting

The other day a machine of mine froze for reasons unknown after about 30 days of uptime. No response to anything.

Upon reboot it got an unrecoverable file system error during fsck.

So I dropped into a shell and issued the command fsck -y -C /dev/md1.

Around 73% it starting reporting

Unattached inode 250083
Connect to /lost+found? yes

Inode 250083 ref count is 2, should be 1. Fix? yes

This has been going on for 24 hours now, and fsck is at

Unattached inode 1494419
Connect to /lost+found? yes

Inode 1494419 ref count is 2, should be 1. Fix? yes

Do you suppose this will ever end? Has fsck gotten into an infinite loop? Shall I scrap the filesystem or let it keep going?

How many days might it take?

I'm running linux 2.4.25 untainted with an ext2 filesystem on an Athlon XP 2000+.

Brian Litzinger