I found out (sort of) what the problem was and found a fix. Apparantly there is something wrong with e2fsprogs 1.27, since it was unable to repair the problem I had in the filesystem (just kept repairing the same thing again and again). I took the disk and attached it to a x86 PC, and ran fsck.ext3 there (an older version, 1.26). It found exactly the same errors as the MIPS system, but actually fixed them so that subsequent runs with "-f" reported no errors. I then put the disk back on the MIPS system - voila, no more filesystem problems. Then did another unclean shutdown, and the same problem reappeared, and once again fsck (on MIPS) was unable to fix it. Then I downloaded e2fsprogs-1.32-6.mipsel.rpm from redhat 9, and installed that on my MIPS system. And that removed the problem for good. So the conclusion must be: The e2fsprogs-1.27 package which is part of the MIPS 7.3 RedHat distribution (CDROM and FTP) is broken. Don't leave home without a newer e2fsprogs RPM just in case! Thanks to everybody who replied! /Hartvig
