It's a legal and expected state for MongoDB to be shutdown (cleanly or via a crash) when there are WT tables on disk, but the checkpointed MDB catalog does not have a collection referencing that table.

Historically this could happen because open cursors would prevent table drops from succeeding. More recently, stable checkpoints can leave nodes in this state after a clean shutdown.

Non-repair MongoDB startup cleans up these leftover tables. However, a node running new-style repair will create a new, "anonymous" collection in the local database to reference these tables for users to inspect their data and make a decision on what to do with it. In addition to re-linking the table into a collection, new-style repair writes a document signaling the node had corruption which keeps the node from rejoining the replica set as a dutiful member. Our powercycle testing gives us confidence that these repairs are likely false positives.

To resolve this state, a user must resync or manually remove the document. Resyncing is expensive. It's not clear when it's safe to override the corruption document.

Options for improving the user experience include:

• Require MongoDB to always have a bijection (one to one relationship) between collection and tables.
• Relaxing repair's requirement that a bijection exists between collections and tables.