Complete disk disaster

[Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz_(_at_)_gmail_(_dot_)_com>]

Hello Friends.

I am new to OpenBSD (but not to Unixes), my experience with this OS is
only a month. I was getting more an more confortable with the OS, and
getting in love with it, but today I have experienced a very weird and
strange thing.

My OpenBSD testing system is installed on the second IDE disk (1GB).

I was enjoying on a happy X-window fluxbox session. I installed "links"
WEB browser package with pkg_add -v ftp://..... , as usual. I was
surfing the net sometime (ppp connection). I stopped the WEB browser and
opened an xterm window, in order to search for certain man page. I was
surprised because I could not see any man page! The error was something
like: "/etc/man.conf/ Not a directory". I stopped the X-window session
and attempted to enter at the console. I was not able to do it. I seemed
that /etc/ directory suffered some kind of damage.

Login: root
Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio login: cannot stat /etc/login.conf: Not
a directory

Aug 22 14:44:42 openbsd-remigio passwd: /etc/pwd.db: Not a directory.

Login incorrect
Login:


and so on.

I started thinking that something serious could have happened, but I
trusted on a reboot. I rebooted the system and it prompted for single
user mode (I do not know if this is the right word, I called it like
that on Linux). I ran and #fsck /dev/wd1a and it discovered plenty of
errors in the /etc/ directory and some other directories. It created a
lost+found with the found garbage......

After the cleaning, I rebooted again, but the /etc/ directory was wiped out.

Also /var/ directory dissapeared. I have searched for /var/log/*
information on the lost+found directory but no luck.

Luckyly, this system is only a system for fun. ;-).

What could cause this disaster?

Please, feel free to ask me for any information that you need before I
wipe the entire disk and install a fresh OpenBSD again.

Thank you very much for your time.

Ramiro.