(I've already sent this message to Ted Ts'o directly. I should have sent it to this list first but I didn't know about it until today. My apologies to Ted.) 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. It turns out that this 4.2TB file system was created in an msdos partition table, as shown below: ---- GNU Parted 1.6.19 Using /dev/sdb (parted) p Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-4291443.000 megabytes Disk label type: msdos Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags 1 0.031 97137.567 primary ext3 ---- Running fsck fails as shown below: ---- 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. ---- I have 2 questions: 1) How did this system run just file for ~6 months using this file system as a /home? I'm suspecting that the problem actually occurred long ago when the file system allocated meta or user data in blocks that are somehow unreachable by fsck but exactly how this could have happened isn't clear. Although it's too late now, I'd really like to know what happened. 2) Given that this happened, how can I recover as many files as possible from this file system? The professor who owns this system had put his faith in hardware RAID so he had never backed it up. He's very nervous right now. Any information or help you can provide would be very much appreciated. Cordially, Jon Forrest Unix Computing Support College of Chemistry Univ. of Cal. Berkeley 173 Tan Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-1460 510-643-1032 jlforrest@xxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
