Two of my ext3 partitions have corrupted directories. "ls" reports that all files in the directory are missing. Any subdirectories are found. e2fsck doesn't find the problem. For each of my ext3 partitions, it sometimes happens that none of the files in the partition are available. If the partition is mounted as ext2, the files become available. All of my ext3 partitions have the "needs_recovery" flag set. See: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=24848 http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=24551 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=606637&group_id=2406&atid=102406
The e2fsprogs bug record (see url in earlier comment) now says: "Err, no, the gentoo forums are a completely different problem. That was their using an earlier version of the htree patches in the kernel." Have recent htree patches fixed this bug?
I'm closing this, this was indeed due to the bad htree patch who's ondisk format was unexpectedly changed, and therefore caused problems with the final version of the patch for e2fsprgs.
