linux-ext4 - Re: fsck ate my ext4 home partition, help!?

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Date:	Tue, 5 May 2009 13:49:17 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Christian Kujau <lists@...dbynature.de>
To:	Marcel Partap <mpartap@....net>
cc:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: fsck ate my ext4 home partition, help!?

On Tue, 5 May 2009, Marcel Partap wrote:
> Sending you the screen output buffer in a minute.

I took the liberty and attached a part of your log to this email.
>From what I can see, fsck warns every time that the filesystem is mounted, 
while in fact it is not (or so it seems, still: /proc/mounts should have 
told for sure). But you ran e2fsck almost always in interactive or 
readonly mode, only 2 times e2fsck attempted to alter the fs:

----------------------
localhost ~ # fsck -p -v /dev/sdd4
fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
/dev/sdd4 is mounted.
WARNING!!!  Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause
SEVERE filesystem damage.
Do you really want to continue (y/n)? yes
/dev/sdd4: recovering journal
fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to re-open /dev/sdd4
----------------------

And the 2nd time it reported:

----------------------
fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdd4
/dev/sdd4: The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
----------------------

Now that you have a backup copy, I'd suggest to get that "but sdd4 is 
mounted" error out of the way and try to e2fsck with a different 
superblock. I find it a bit harsh for ext3 to bail out completly when 
almost nothing has been altered by e2fsck. Then again, we still don't know 
what caused the filesystem errors in the first place and how long they 
have been there, waiting to be discovered by these weird e2fsck runs...

Christian.
-- 
On Bruce Schneier's birthday, a person standing at the very center of
Stonehenge casts a shadow in the shape of Bruce Schneier's PGP public key
fingerprint.
View attachment "sdc4mess_p.txt" of type "TEXT/PLAIN" (21821 bytes)