On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 08:39:33AM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote: > > Well, if you repartitioned / moved the partition, then the new mkfs > likely wouldn't have perfectly overwritten the old metadata structures, > so if you can re-partition again and put the starting sector -back- at > the original location, an e2fsck might have a fighting chance to find > -something- ... I thought what had been done was that a physical disk had a new ESX layout slapped on top of it, and then a new partition label was created, and *then* mkfs.ext4 was run --- so that the new filesystem pretty much overlaid the original filesystem. In that case, there really isn't much that can be done. If the repartitioning really did move the start of the filesystem sufficiently to avoid smashing all of the metadata fields, then I agree, there might be a chance.... One idea which Andi Kleen and I tossed around at Linux Kongress was to add a 4 byte per-inode CRC that also mixed in the inode number (to detect inode table blocks getting written to the wrong location on disk) as well as a per-filesystem ID. This would allow us to detect inodes from pervious filesystems formats, which would also allow us to avoid needing to zero out the inode table, and it might allow for people to have a slightly better chance of recovering after a mke2fs (as well as making mke2fs faster without needing to zero the inode table, either in mke2fs or via a background kernel thread once the file system is mounted). - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
