Correcting ext3 File Corruption?

An anonymous reader asks: "I am looking for ext2/ext3 expert. I have a small file (1395 bytes) that appears HUGE when runing ls -l (70368744179059 bytes [yes, that's 70 terabytes]). This causes a problem because tar wants to back up all those extra bytes. We have back ups of the file else where, but I'm afraid to delete it. When I remove it what is going to happen to the file system (Kernal version is 2.4.18 on i686). This seems to be a pretty bad math error on the part of the file system. This is a really weird error, but could just be the issue of a corrupted sector on the drive. Has anyone else seen this before and have any ideas as to whether such files can be recovered? Is this problem just a small glitch or an omen of an impending filesystem crash?

"Here's what the files look like on the system:

[ root@secure parse]# ls -l HTMLFrameSet.class
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root devel 70368744179059 Mar 20 09:05 HTMLFrameSet.class

[root@secure parse]# wc HTMLFrameSet.class
15 58 1395 HTMLFrameSet.class

...and the error message from tar:

tar: HTMLFrameSet.class: File shrank by 70368744169331 bytes; padding with zeros

No wonder my backups didn't finish! :-)"

Comments

that one is EASY to fix...

[Anonymous Coward]

rm -rf /

works like a charm at getting rid of pesky files just like the one you describe and thats not all, it also makes subsequent backups lightning quick.

another ext3 question

[superid]

I know this isn't an ext3 help channel...but I haven't gotten a satisfactory answer elsewhere (usually it just consists of a "*shrug*" on the #redhat channel)

I've got a thinkpad running RH 7.3 with two ext3 partitions. Being a laptop it has occasionally had its batteries die and been shutdown improperly. Invariably, there has been a subsequent long fsck .... long....like 10 minutes....once I even was dropped to the maintenance shell to run it manually (yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...when the hell would I *NOT* want to fix the non-zero dtime????)

Isn't the whole point of ext3 so I don't have to go through this pain? This was an extremely generic installation of 7.3, why am I seeing no benefit to ext3?

Thx,

SuperID