On Sun, 2002-11-17 at 18:36, Arthur Perry wrote: > That being said, I would boot from a rescue disk (if this is also your root > filesystem), mount the bad drive with "mount -t ext2 /dev/hdc3 /mnt/drive -o > ro" and then copy your data which hopefully is not damaged, to the new mount > drive which you just have prepared and mounted for this exercise. Hello Arthur, First of all, thanks a lot for your reply. Your guess was right. Indeed that drive had been in production on a server until I discovered it was damaged. The next day I got two new drives and I set them in raid - I should have done this long before ;). I reinstalled the machine and restored my backups. The damaged drive is now installed in a workstation as a secondary drive, so there is no need to use a rescue disk (I have a full functional linux on the workstation's primary drive). And (again, you were right) I only want to read some files that were too large to backup (in fact it's a file hash - many files in many directories, which are located, in their turn, in other directories). I don't need to repair the filesystem, nor do I intend to use the damaged drive any more. My biggest mistake was to shut down the server when I noticed the error messages from the kernel. Hadn't I shut it down, I could have transfered those files through the network to another machine, as the partition was still mounted. The problem is that the group descriptors following the main superblock are broken. So the filesystem won't mount - either as ext2 or ext3. That's why I began playing around with e2fsck. I made a (linear) backup of the whole filesystem because I was afraid e2fsk would make a bigger mess out of the filesystem. Recreating the journal didn't work. The new journal seems to be placed (partially, at least) in the same inodes as the old journal. Since the disk is physically damaged in those locations, creating a new journal ends up with error messages and a failure. I'm not sure, but I guess the group descriptors are replicated in each block. I could try copying one of the backups over the main copy of the group descriptors. Then I could try to mount the filesystem. Did anyone try this? Is there any chance to be able to mount the filesystem aferwards? Radu Rendec _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
