Can't link?

[Ian Stirling <root@mauve.demon.co.uk>]

Rather odd thing happening right now, that I can't figure out.

Running 2.4.11 on a ext2 filesystem, with a couple of 40Gb drives, and 
some NFS mounts.

After reading man link, I tried the following in /

bash-2.03# >1 
bash-2.03# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root            0 Nov 20 01:57 1
bash-2.03# ln 1 2
ln: cannot create hard link `2' to `1': No such file or directory

With strace:
stat("1", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
lstat("2", 0xbffff824)                  = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
lstat("2", 0xbffff824)                  = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
link("1", "2")                          = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

I tried this with root, as shown above, when I encountered bizarre problems
due to tin not being able to rename files.