Solaris

Hie

I am running a sun solaris server of about 300 gigabytes disk capacity. The problem is that the machine has been having problems over the past year and at times the machine would just freeze or hang and had to be re-booted. Consequently there are too many entries in the lost+found directories. Almost every file system ( I have 8 file systems on the server) has a lost+found directory which would consume up to 5 gigabytes of disk space. As a result i am running out of space on the machine.

What would be the effect of deleting entries from these lost+found directories? Are the effects disastrous? Can you advise me on the way forward becuase i need to release space for use by systems that are running on this machine.

Ranganai.

lost+found with that level of information usually means you have pretty corrupt filesystem, that is where the truncated information goes after an fsck.

If the machine is still working correctly (which it does not appear to be) then you've been lucky and you didn't loose anything important and you could delete the contents. However in your case it looks like it may be too late for that, in this situation I would remake the filesystems and reinstall/restore from know good backups where possible and turn on filesystem logging to reduce the risk of losing data in the future.