Corrupt logs & some other files.

Question

It's a pity that my first post will be about a problem, but I don't have time for long introductions. So, Hi, I'm new here.
I've got two problems which might be related somehow, but I will post them in two separate threads. (This is the other one - X wont start.)
Some files in /var/log are corrupted. This is how it looks like:
/var/log # file *
ConsoleKit: directory
Xorg.0.log: ASCII English text
Xorg.0.log.old: data
auth.log: data
btmp: empty
crond: data
daemon.log: data
dmesg.log: ASCII C++ program text
errors.log: data
everything.log: data
faillog: data
kernel.log: data
lastlog: data
messages.log: data
mpd: directory
old: directory
pacman.log: ASCII English text
pm-powersave.log: ASCII text
pm-suspend.log: ASCII text
syslog.log: data
user.log: ASCII text
wtmp: data
These files should contain text and should not be recognized as 'data'. Instead, some are normal, some contain non-textual data.
I discovered this after X was not starting and I checked the Xorg.0.log file. 'less' warned me that the file might be binary and indeed it was gibberish. It even contained some log entries which weren't normal xorg logs, but looked like the output I get when the kernel loads. Then I found most of the files in that folder are not ascii text as they are supposed to, but 'data' and even more corrupted.
On my home partition I only found that viminfo got corrupted twice, again containing some random stuff which should be in other files.
I ran the system rescue cd and fsck'ed both partitions (ext3), but it says there are no problems.
Now here is the connection to my second problem. X sometimes won't start, I get a black screen and I need to power down by holding the power button. After I restart the xorg log is corrupted. If X starts correctly, the log is normal. Could it be that this hard shutdown while the files are open for IO corrupts them? This sounds plausible to me, but such thing never happened to me before.
Thanks for your time.
Last edited by spupy (2009-08-15 20:05:24)

Answer 1

djszapi wrote:1. "On my home partition I only found that viminfo got corrupted twice" Sometimes, it occurs by me too, I delete this file then, but it's a rare situation
2. "I ran the system rescue cd and fsck'ed both partitions" -> Did you get any direct filesystem error message from the system?
3. What happens if you try to delete the corrupted files and restart ? Does it become corrupted too every time?
4."X sometimes won't start, I get a black screen and I need to power down by holding the power button." -> Which driver/kernel/xorg version do you use ? I've experienced such a situation with the nvidia-185.18.31 driver.
Thank you for your quick response.
1. Is it safe to delete the corrupted files in /var/log? I already deleted viminfo after it got corrupted the first time, but it happened again.
2. In the rescue cd, fsck quickly said "it's ok" without checking. Is there a way to force it to check? The man page doesn't say. The longer check I get sometimes when booting ("hasn't been checked in the last X mounts yadda yadda") shows only "fixed write time in the future" from time to time.
3. The Xorg.0.log particularly gets corrupted after the hard restart that I issue when X fails to start and a black screen locks up the pc.
4. xf86-video-ati is 6.12.2-2, kernel26 is 2.6.30.4-1. xorg-server: 1.6.3-2. The black screen issue will be (I hope) solved in the other thread I made (link in first post), but I have the suspicion that both problems are very closely related (one is the cause for the other, or some sort of vicious circle.)