Hi, I'm continuing a series of emails I had with Eric Sandeen
<sandeen@xxxxxxxxxxx> on September 19, 2020, about trying to recover
data from a corrupted file system where xfs_repair fails with `fatal
error -- couldn't map inode 132, err = 117`
Last time the issue was declared to be a hardware problem; I have bought
an equal drive to that one, and I have used ddrescue to clone the disk
over to the new drive, without the encryption, so the data is not
mangled and possible data logs should be more readable.
Trying to run xfs_repair on that drive clone leads to the same error,
but using `photorec` does show that all the files are still readable, so
there must be a way to recover them while keeping the file structure and
filenames they had, as `photorec` does not do this. `testdisk` does do
this, but it is not supported on xfs, so it's sadly not an option.
Since I have a drive clone now, I'm able to do more risky repair
procedures like trying to use dd to rewrite corrupted areas to make
xfs_repair work, or similar; but I'm unable to find any information
about locating inodes on the drive, so help doing this would be appreciated.
The end goal is to have a readable drive, to then be able to backup all
the files with their file structure, I know all the data is there and
readable, so broken hardware is no longer an excuse, as the cloned data
is on a brand new drive with 0 bad sectors and all OK S.M.A.R.T.
- Agustín (Austin in English)
