Why do I have a dodgy file system?

[Georgina Joyce]

Hello All,

Well I decided to blow the dust off my debian squeeze box. In an attempt 
to see if I could use linux to flash android phones. My problem is that 
I'm having difficulties in working with files. I've downloaded eclypse 
and jdk files. Obviously, then using the tar, mv, cp, ls commands. At 
first I thought I'd download x64 files and trying to use them on a 32bit 
system. But that's not the case. Sometimes the ls command will list them 
and sometimes it won't stating file or directory not found. It is very 
difficult to delete files. I had to use speakup's copy and paste command 
to paste the full name as tab completion also sometimes works and 
sometimes doesn't, even as root. I also had to use the -rf flags too. 
I'd managed to extract the eclypse tarball in /opt and created a short 
script in /usr/bin/eclypse that exported a ECLYPSE_HOME variable and 
then pointed to /opt/eclypse/eclypse but every time the system stated 
that such a file didn't exist. I tried viewing it's properties with ls 
and tried to set permissions using chmod but it's as if it wasn't there. 
I know it was and it took some effort in removing it all.

I've never seen such behaviour from linux. My experience is that it 
either does it or it doesn't and is constant. I'd done a update before I 
attempted grabbing and working with new files.

Has anyone experienced this kind of thing? Where should I look? A 
filesystem check fsck on /home doesn't have any problem. Any help, 
please? Is it hardware failure?

Thanks.

Gena