Following up to madduck's and gwolf's recent horror stories on XFS, last Thursday, my desktop greeted me after the fantastic week around Asturies with a series of I/O errors whenever I tried to execute something. I rebooted, and then the kernel wasn't happy.

I/O error in filesystem ("hda1") meta-data dev hda1 block 0x4a9778  ("xlog_iodone") error 5 buf count 1024

/dev/hda1 is my / partition, and the machine would not boot at all. To make things more interesting, the box refused to boot from any of my old CD and DVD drives.

Yesterday, with my mail piling up already at Sindominio's mailserver, I managed to find a spare CD writer, which would not open its tray, and a DVD reader which managed to boot a Breezy Live CD I had around.

The good guys at #xfs were helpful as always and helped me in the process of not fucking up my valuable root filesystem while trying to fix it. The filesystem ended up having quite some corruption here and there, but after xfs_repair, nubol was able to boot again. Only it was missing libldap.so.2, libX11.so.6, debconf programs and other minor details like those. Some reinstall rounds later, GNOME was able to startup without errors and now the box is up and running.

Does anyone know of some script that compares dpkg's contents database with that the filesystem has, so I can easily find the rest of damaged packages to reinstall them?