Attempting To Recover, fsck infinite looping on me

[John Freer]

Hey all,

Had a power failure and subsequent ext3 disk corruptions.  Attempting
to fix, but not working.

Its a 120 gig IDE disk, 3 partitions.  /boot, /, and swap.  

Basically can't boot up since the box can't get to the system files
in /usr/ or anything.

So I'm booting off of a FC2 disk 1 in recovery mode and trying to fix
the filesystem with e2fsck

The boot partition cleaned up fine.

The swap partition came back up when I did "/sbin/mkswap /dev/hda3"
and "/sbin/swapon -a"


I cannot, however, get fsck to run fully on /dev/hda2 (the main part
of the drive).  I run it and it goes through the first few recovery
steps (1A, 1B, 1C), and then it comes to the problem.

It lists a bunch of inodes (like 150) and asks:

"Clone duplicate/bad blocks? (y)"  I get about 6 of these messages
with varying lists of inodes.

I say yes, and fsck continues.  But, after about 6 of these messages,
the cycle of "Clone duplicate/bad blocks?" repeats.  I looked closely
at the listing of inodes, and the same 6 or so groupings of blocks
are (i guess) asking to be cloned?

So the program just loops, infinitely looping through the yes
answers.  (2 hours now).

No difference if I go through manually and say no, don't clone the
blocks.  Just loops through the same lists.

Some data:

+ I've got a gig of ram in the box, and (I think) swap space is on.
+ There may be some several 4 gig files that were corrupted.
+ By using top in another terminal, I find processor pegged at 99%

What can I do to recover this drive?

Thanks,
John.



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John J Freer
518.441.9647 / john_freer at yahoo.com