Undeletable file and fsck takes ages...

Hi,

I've got the problem that in one of my folders, I have a file that is unable to delete. It consists of an unprintable character and when I try to delete the parent directory with rm -rf, all it says is that it can't delete the file, because it doesn't exist :confused:...
The weird thing is that if I edit this file with midnight commander and save it, the same file name exists two times, with exactly the same inode number. I can then delete the file once, but the second time the error re-occurs.


I think that maybe the ext2 filesystem is corrupt and wanted to run e2fsck after unmounting the 160GB main partition, leaving the swap partition activated.
After eight hours, it is still in "phase 1" of the checking. A parallel "top" tells me that it's actively working, but it just doesn't seem to finish. The harddisk is maybe 40% full.

So my question is what is wrong here? Are there any ways to speed up e2fsck without disassembling the unit and connecting the harddisk to a linux server?

Or is there another way to get rid of this strange file?

Any help is highly appreciated,

F.

Connect the drive to a linux desktop/laptop and run e2fsck there.
Or rsync the contents to a remove linux machine, and reformat the partition, rsync back.
The fastest way will be to disassemble the unit and move the drive to the desktop.

Ok, that would be the worst case as the drive is located at my parent's place and I can't just drive a couple of hundred kilometers plus setting up a Linux PC just to remove one single file ;).
Rsyncing 80 GB back and forth over a rather slow DSL connection is also not really an option...

Is there a reason why fsck takes so long and is there any possibility to speed it up somehow?

After three (!) days (!), I stopped e2fsck, took the effort to connect it to a laptop with Knoppix, ran e2fsck there and it finished the job in 20 minutes. Very strange...
This way, the unprintable character problem was solved as well so now everything's fine again :).

F.