Yesterday we started having problems with our emails. Investigating this, I found that there some files on our system that show all the attributes including inode, owner, group, permissions, size and date as questions marks when listed by an ls command.

When I try to access any of these files to view them, update them, move or delete them, I get an input/output error. Due to the inode also being shown as a question mark rather than a real value, I can't delete them using the inode.

Now I can't even do an ls on this system - I get a segmentation fault when I try to run the ls command.

Any thoughts on what might be happening and how I can recover from this problem? Is there any further information I might be able to provide that could help towards finding a cause and with luck a solution? The box is running Debian wheezy.

Yesterday we started having problems with our emails. Investigating this, I found that there some files on our system that show all the attributes including inode, owner, group, permissions, size and date as questions marks when listed by an ls command.

When I try to access any of these files to view them, update them, move or delete them, I get an input/output error. Due to the inode also being shown as a question mark rather than a real value, I can't delete them using the inode.

Now I can't even do an ls on this system - I get a segmentation fault when I try to run the ls command.

Any thoughts on what might be happening and how I can recover from this problem? Is there any further information I might be able to provide that could help towards finding a cause and with luck a solution? The box is running Debian Wheezy.