Corrupt ext3 fs is irritating!!!

[Kozusnik]

Aarrgh!
I used to like ext3 until it corrupted a 250GB disk with about 90GB of data. I had a power failure a few days ago and just had the opportunity to turn the pc back on. To my dismay, my large hdd has a bad superblock and cannot be read. Lovely.
Here's what I've done so far...maybe this will help someone in the future.
emacs /etc/fstab -> remove /dev/hdg1 'cause it won't boot
reboot
e2fsck /dev/hdg1 -> nope same error
mke2fs -n /dev/hdg1 -> find backup superblocks
e2fsck -b 4096000 /dev/hdg1 -> try every other superblock nope
I finally got pissed enough to not worry about the data, so...
tune2fs -O^has_journal /dev/hdg1 -> remove journals (basically convert to ext2) did not lose data, but you can't always count on those results

Now I'm able to retrieve most of the data. There are several directories which cannot be viewed ?--------- rather than drwxrwx---.

I'm in the middle of backing up what I can to another drive, then I plan on deleting the items I am able to view now and try some more to get the corrupted stuff back.

If anyone has a suggestion, I'd be glad to listen.

Thanks --- Mark

 

[Kozusnik]

Next step was to delete the backed up data and fsck the unmounted filesystem. That took a long time on a 250GB hdd. Anyway, once the fsck renamed everything to #somenumber, I made a tarball and moved it off of that drive.

Time to blow that partition away! I'll set up two 125s on it and test the hell out of it to make sure it's not going bad.

Later,
Mark