TL;DR: Formatted an external hard drive with ext4 filesystem, repaired it using fsck, and have a lost+found directory on it with thousands of unneeded files. I know that lost+found can't be deleted, but how do I get rid of these unneeded files and make sure that fsck does not repopulate these same files again on reboot?
I have already read through the following relevant links:
- Undeletable directory in lost+found
- What is the purpose of the lost+found directory in Linux and Unix?
but was not able to find a solution to my problem.
I bought a new drive and loaded a couple GB of data onto it, but wanted to start from scratch again so I deleted all of the files on the drive through $ rm -rf ./*. I then noticed that this drive was formatted as a FAT drive and I wanted an ext4 partition only, so I used parted to format the drive (/dev/sda):
$ sudo parted /dev/sda
(parted) p
<some output indicating 2 partitions on the drive>
(parted) rm 1
(parted) rm 2
(parted) p
<I verify that there are no more partitions>
(parted) mklabel gpt
<parted tells me that there's an existing filesystem that will be overwritten and I confirm>
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
<confirmation stuff as well>
(parted) p
<verify that all is as it should be... or so I thought>
(parted) q
After quitting and trying to mount the device, I could not mount the new partition. Upon checking the filesystem, I saw that the partition was corrupted and tried $ sudo fsck -y /dev/sda1 (sda1 is the new, sole partition on the drive, formatted as ext4). This went through and formatted my partition as ext2, so I went back and repeated the reformatting steps using parted and tried $ sudo fsck -yt ext4 /dev/sda1 and it seemed to work well enough.
I could now mount the filesystem and it remained ext4. However, there is a lost+found directory with thousands of files within it now sitting in the drive. It is owned by root:root and even with a $ sudo rm -rf lost+found, I cannot delete it. It keeps spitting out rm: cannot remove '#<name of file>': Operation not permitted for every file I attempt to remove. Neither chmod nor chown help in helping remove the files located within this lost+found directory.
I then tried $ sudo su so I could # cd lost+found and check the attributes of the files with # lsattr but I still, even as root, get lsattr: Operation not supported While reading flags on ./#<name of the file>.
I have no need for any files on the system. I was toying around with rsync between my local machine and host and those are all of the files that I deleted. I know I don't need any of them (I have other backups in addition to all of those files present on my local machine) so I just want to get rid of this darned lost+found directory but it's being quite stubborn.
So, with all of that said:
What should I do? What are my next steps? Is there any more information I should provide from program output that could help figure this out?
Would it be easier to just format the drive again? I tried doing so twice already, but each time it will not mount without an $ fsck -t ext4 /dev/sda1 (I include the -y flag in there as well since I don't want to sit through the millions of confirmations it requires) and I end up here once again. I know that these lost+found files are being generated by the fsck program since I passed the -y option to it: there are parts of the output where it specifies that "there is existing data on the drive and it could be recovered, so should fsck move these files to lost+found?" and it automatically gets passed an affirmative so the directory gets created and populated with these thousands of files. Is it because I specify this partition as a primary partition? Should it be extended instead (only holding data files)?
Any help would be appreciated! Though the files don't take up much space on the hard drive (~1%), I would appreciate help in figuring this out since I want to understand why even root cannot delete these files and what I'm doing so horribly wrong in formatting my drives that I end up here every time.
Edits:
After logging in as root through $ sudo su, I could view the files within lost+found and tried to test the lost+found directory itself for processes that were locking the directory and the first file that was in the directory as well to see if anything was using it:
$ sudo su
# lsof lost+found
<no output>
# fuser lost+found
<no output>
# lsof lost+found/#51817
<no output>
# fuser lost+found/#51817
<no output>
Doesn't look like any other processes are locking these files. Upon examining with # lsattr, there are a couple files with the i flag, but there are many more without that flag.
Furthermore, as @PabloBianchi pointed out in the comments, since ext*-formatted filesystems will always have a lost+found directory, I have clarified the question by modifying the title: instead of deleting said directory, how can I clear it so the files I know I don't need to recover don't waste space on my drive?
