OpenSUSE Install :: How To Change Filetype

the filetype of a file? You know, when you type ls -l in a terminal, you get a long description of each file in that directory. The first letter indicates what that file is (- for regular file, d for directory, l for link, etc)My problem is that I have a data directory in /home that shows up like this:?--------- 1 root root 0 1969-12-31 20:00 suniI did managed to change this to?rwxrwxr-- 1 suni users 0 1969-12-31 20:00 sunibut what do I do with the "?" ???and as you can see the size of this supposed-to-be directory is zero, and I do not understand why. Also the date is quite absurd.

how did I end up here? One day I could not boot, I tried a boot disk to use some repair tools. The automatic thingy stomped all over the faulty /home partition, and fixed it by wiping it clean, only the lost+found directory was there when I managed to boot. So I unmounted /home and tried to see what can I do with dumpe2fs, fsck, e2fsck, debugfs, but that's all I could achieve. I saved the terminal window content for further analysis, so if you need to look into it, I can provide that (I just didn't think that it would be appropriate to dump it right here).

Other system info: when I could not boot I had openSUSE 11.1 x86_64, AMD processor, 4GB DDR400, RAID5, with ext3 file system. I had a 11.2 i386 install DVD for my kids play computer, so I tried to use that for recovery - but I don't think that the version nr or the architecture difference would have caused the wipe-out of /home. Instead, I am convinced that I was a lazy idiot and I just left everything to the machine brainlessly