How To Recover From Creating >2TB ext3 Filesystem on MSDOS Partition Table?

[Andreas Dilger]

On Mar 12, 2007  08:29 -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
> Last Friday a system that I just inherited refused to mount
> a file system that had been working fine for about 6 months.
> This is on a Scientific Linux 4.3 system using a 2.6.9
> kernel. This is another Linux distribution based on RHEL 4.
> I don't think the actual hardware is relevant
> here so I won't mention it. If there's more information you'd
> like to see I'd be happy to provide it.
> 
> ----
> e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
> The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 1098609033 blocks
> The physical size of the device is 24867209 blocks
> Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!
> Abort<y>? yes
> 
> Error reading block 24870914 (Invalid argument) while doing inode scan.

Did you recently update your kernel?  Is your kernel using CONFIG_LBD?
If CONFIG_LBD is not set, then any use of > 2TB is completely unsafe.
It will silently and fatally corrupt your filesystem.  I'd pointed this
out previously, but the patch I submitted wasn't accepted.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.