Re: Seriously corrupt ext3 root filesystem - help?

[Andreas Dilger <adilger clusterfs com>]

On Jul 20, 2003  14:57 -0500, Eddy wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 09:45:09 -0700, "Andreas Dilger"
> <adilger clusterfs com> said:
> > > I booted off CD and attempted to fsck. Unfortunately, everything I've
> > > tried has proved futile and I'm _desperate_ for some help. I've google'd
> > > for just about everything I can think of and am out of ideas. :-(
> > >
> > > # debugfs -w /dev/hda1
> > > debugfs 1.28 (31-Aug-2002)
> > > /dev/hda1: Can't read an inode bitmap while reading inode bitmap
> > > debugfs: open -c /dev/hda1
> > > /dev/hda1: catastrophic mode - not reading inode or group bitmaps
> > > debugfs: stat <8>
> > > stat: Invalid argument while reading inode 8
> > > debugfs: stats
> > > ...
> > > Filesystem features:    has_journal filetype sparse_super
> > > Filesystem state:       clean with errors
> > > ...
> > > Directories:            1122431
> > >  Group  0: block bitmap at 33188, inode bitmap at 19132, inode table at
> > >  1027802808
> > >            6794 free blocks, 15870 free inodes, 1720 used directories
> > >  Group  1: block bitmap at 0, inode bitmap at 0, inode table at 3016944
> > >            2289 free blocks, 46 free inodes, 2290 used directories
> > > ...
> >
> > Try gpart to see if it is your partition table that is corrupt.
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion. The partition table seems to be intact and 
> correct.
> 
> Any other ideas on how to try and recover the data on this filesystem?
> (The other filesystems on the drive are fine. Unfortunately they don't
> contain the bulk of the data that I need.)

If gpart showed that the partition tables are OK, then this also means
that your ext3 backup superblocks are available.  You should force e2fsck
to use one of the backups with -b 32768 (or whatever a backup superblock
location is).

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/