I've just gone through an unpleasant episode.
I use an 8 gig CF formatted ext2, and usually never pull it out, am careful to try to reboot, instead of just pulling the bat... Though I did pull out the bat a couple of times yesterday.
Then in the morning I could only read a couple of files from the CF, and a bunch of directories and files gave me an Input/output error...
Which pissed me off big time, since I obviously forget to back up all the time, and have "lost a lotta stuff"...
Messed around with it in the morn... Searched the web, but nothing conclusive, usually the respondents said "bad blocks..."
After finally deciding to reformat the CF, with teeth screeching I umounted, fdisked, deleted the old partition - which for some reason was showing as extra huge, beyond the physical limits of the CF, which is what the fsck was complaining.
Created a new 1 partition for the CF, saved the partition table. Then forgot to halt, pulled the CF out. Realized this... Felt like slapping myself. So rebooted, expecting to do it again...
And lo and behold, the data is back! I can't believe it. No input/output errors, can read and copy files off of it.
What the... ?
So am gonna back up the data now... I hope...
But what's gone on?
Apparently just fixing the partitions size fixed it... What could've caused this problem?
And what should I be extra careful about in the future to prevent it from happening again? Maybe with more serious damage...
