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

Re:And when you run "fsck"?

[return 42]

No no no! Don't run fsck!

If you run fsck, it'll fsck your drive. You'll be totally fscked.