I guess some of the trouble was that the virtual disk was mounted read-only at the VM level. When I mounted read/write I was able to do fsck, which gave messages about replaying the logs and a couple messages about changing the inode counts (sorry, don't have the exact words). Then I ran fsck -f, which didn't report any problems. Then I mounted it, and everything seems OK.
I'm still interested in the general question about how to diagnose and recover from file system errors, since I have another virtual machine that was backed by a failing real disk.
________________________________________
From: Boylan, Ross
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2015 4:35 PM
To: Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: recovering corrupt file system
Any recommendations for tools to diagnose and recover problems on an ext4 file system?
In particular:
root@jessie01:~# mount -o ro /dev/markov02/root /mnt/markov02
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/markov02-root,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so.
and e2fsck says
root@jessie01:~# e2fsck /dev/markov02/root
e2fsck 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
/dev/markov02/root: recovering journal
Superblock needs_recovery flag is clear, but journal has data.
markov02/root is an LVM volume, built on partitions from 2 disks in a virtual machine. The initial symptom was that the VM the disks were in originally would only get as far as busybox when it started. However, I think the filesystem was OK even after that, since it was visible in busybox and in another VM. I think virt-manager might have overwritten on of the disks because I left "allocate entire disk now" checked when I moved one of the disks between machines.
I'm making copies of the virtual disks now.
Ross Boylan
_______________________________________________
Ext3-users mailing list
Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
