Attempting To Recover, fsck infinite looping on me

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 09:50:39AM -0800, John Freer wrote:
> 
> 1.  120G ATA133 Drive.  Unclean shutdown during power failure.
> 2.  XP2200, Via chipset ECS K7S5A Mobo, 1G ram.
> 3.  Drive broken into 3 partitions, / (hda2), /boot (hda1), and swap
> (hda3).  Bulk of the drive is in / (hda2).
> 4.  on reboot, unable to mount the / partition, boot halted.
> 5.  on next boot, used e2fsck by booting off of RHFC2 Disk 1 in
> "linux rescue" mode. ie: e2fsck -vy /dev/hda2.  Many errors reported,
> including a statement that the journal was corrupted and needed to be
> removed.  Think it was fsck ver. 1.35.

This is e2fsck as modified by Fedora Core, which is not the same as
stock e2fsprogs, but this is one I haven't heard of before.

> 
>    +Crunched for about 10 minutes through passes 1A, 1B, 1C, and
> started 1D.
>    +fsck hangs in the middle of pass 1D, then after approx. 20
> seconds hung seems to restart pass 1D.

Hmm... that doesn't make any sense.  I'm not sure what's going on.

>      IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN RUN e2fsck AND TRAP THE OUTPUT TO A FILE,
> SAY, LIKE e2fsck -vy /dev/hda >> /tmp/output.txt ?  How would I
> format the syntax?

Use the script command.  See the script(1) man page for more details.

>      I'll be happy to do this and make all the data available if it
> would help.

The other thing that you can do that would be helpful is to run the
command "e2image -r /dev/hda2 | bzip2 > hda2.e2i.bz2", and make
hda2.e2i.bz2 available somewhere I can download it.  This will save
all of the metadata blocks, although none of the data blocks.  So I
will be able to see the names of your files in your directories, but
not the conents of any of the files.  (Not that I would reveal
anything that I might find, but I want to make sure you know exactly
what data you would be exporting.)

This will allow me to try to replicate whatever you're seeing on my
computer.

One final thing; have you checked your kernel logs to see if there are
any hard drive errors?  E2fsck fundamentally assumes that the disk
drive is good; that data written to the disk, if read later on, will
be reliably returned.  If there are hardware problems with your disk,
that can ause all sorts of wierd problems.

							- Ted