[lug] e2fsck emergency

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 12:11:10AM -0700, D. Stimits wrote:
> It is so badly corrupted it can't believe it is ext2:
> 
> e2fsck: bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda2
> 
> The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
> filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
> ....

Yes, but ex2fs stores multiple copies of the superblock. You can
run e2fsck with the '-b' switch and give it an alternative superblock.

> My experience has been that if things die, simply doing 'fsck -y /dev/hda1'
> will fix it quite nicely.
> 
> This must be a typo, or I have a different fsck. No -y is possible. This is 
> on Redhat 6.2. 

??? This is a rather old option (it basically 'answers' all questions 
with 'yes'. Convenient, but not neccessary ...).

> Somewhere I am hoping to find an option to fsck that says 
> "yes, this is ext2, and it is so badly corrupted, I want you to do what I 
> say no matter how ridiculous, and not exit on me". However, it always 
> exits. 

Well, how could the program do any usefull work if it can't even find
the basic info? I think you should try '-b ...' (the manpage gives
default values for the location of the backup superblocks, so i won't
retype them here).

> I have tried various options, including specifically the manual 
> ones, totally non-automatic. Maybe I'm missing something, but the compile 
> probably had 100 megs in the middle of change at the time of failure...it 
> is bad.
> 
> If you do go for a reformat/reinstall solution, and insist on a journaling 
> fs,
> then ReiserFS is one of the best choices. However, you're still running 
> beta
> code if you do so. And the only distro I'm aware of which supports Reiser 
> out
> of the box is Mandrake.

SuSE has it too (they actually push it quite a bit -- and pay for it
AFAIK).



 Ralf