Hi, I'm using CentOS 5 on all my computers here (work + home) and I'm very satisfied with it. Some time ago I purchased a 300 GB external hard drive to store films, music, pictures and documents. Since there's no Windows machine around here (small South French village, town hall and public library use Linux :o)), I replaced the FAT filesystem on the disk by an ext2 filesystem. Now it's already almost full with data. A few days ago I had a problem with the subdirectory Cinema/ containing a collection of my favourite movies. I wanted to copy them from the disk to my newly purchased laptop (ASUS W6F, already running CentOS 5), when suddenly I got a read error on data. I checked in a Terminal what was going on, and the file ownerships were all curiously set, like missing read flags, no more --x rights on directories, whereas I remember I had set them right in the first place. So I started a series of recursive chmod's on the directory Cinema/... but I got nothing: the command prompt never went back. Unmounting the disk was not responsive neither, so I just shut it off. When I was performing this, it was a very hot day, almost 40°C. The disk was really very hot, so I wonder if this might have damaged it. I could retrieve some of the data on the disk (music, pictures, documents), but now, instead of the Cinema/ directory, I have one big file that looks like this: [kikinovak at buzz:/media/disk/Films] $ ls -l total 692996 -rw-r----- 1 678756852 34537972 148381783526817280 avr 28 01:01 Cinema drwxr-xr-x 3 kikinovak kikinovak 4096 mai 9 10:07 Anime drwxrwxrwx 4 kikinovak kikinovak 4096 mai 10 12:25 Series Notice that the file size is something like petabytes :oD Is there any way to repair this obviously corrupt data? Cheers, Niki Kovacs