WARNING - Possible Data Corruption

[John Wendel]

I just saw what appears to be a data corruption problem on one of my 
boxes. I'm not sure at this point exactly whats happening, but I 
thought I'd warn people that there might be a problem.

Software

Latest FC6 with updates as of last night, running 2.6.19.***. No LVM, 
no raid, 3 drives, 1 IDE, 2 SATA.

Hardware

Older Intel P4 on a VIA based motherboard. This system has been 
totally stable for about 2 years and I use it daily without seeing any 
problems.

[1] Seagate IDE drive on a VIA 8235 controller, system boots from this 
disk and it holds the /home partition.

[2] Maxtor SATA drive on a Promise TX2300 controller mounted on 
"data2" in my home directory.

What I saw

On the IDE drive, in my home directory, I have a directory ("DVD") 
holding three dvd ISO images. I wanted to move the images to the SATA 
drive because the IDE drive was getting full (80% used).

I copied ("cp -a DVD data2/DVD") the 3 DVD images (27 GB) from the IDE 
drive to the SATA drive. After the copy, I did a "du" in the source 
and destination directories. All of the destination files were smaller 
than the source files. I checked /var/log/messages and didn't see any 
errors.

At that point, I had to leave for work, so I haven't done any more 
investigation. When I get back home, I'll of course retry the copy.

Anybody got any clues about what I should look for / try next?

Thanks,

John