[mdlug] Recovering damaged EXT2

[Aaron Kulkis]

David McMillan wrote:
> 	So, one of the two big USB drives I've been using as a poor man's 
> RAID-1 (using periodic rsync) died, and I bought a replacement and 
> immediately began a fresh rsync to copy the remaining drive to the new 
> one.  No big deal... except that, thanks to a dangling cord and careless 
> footwork (my own), the remaining drive of the original pair fell off the 
> table and hit the floor.  It *seems* okay -- no weird noises, parted 
> recognizes its filesystem (ext2) and size, but....
> 	Now, when I try to mount it, I get a "bad superblock" error.  If I try 
> to run fsck or e2fsck, I get "the superblock is corrupt" and a 
> suggestion to run e2fsck with the "e2fsck -b 8192 <device".  But if I 
> try that, I get a "device busy" error message, even though the partition 
> is not mounted and no other process is accessing that drive.
> 
> 	So... am I screwed?  Or are there tools that might allow me to recover 
> what was on this drive?

A couple things to do:

1. look at /var/log/messages and /var/log/warn

2. Do an orderly shutdown and reboot.

$ su
password:
# init 6


3.  Reload from backup tapes.

Remember, mirroring are NOT a substitute for backups.