Problem in e2fsck ? read error in journal inode

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 16:31:09 +0100,
  Erik Andersen <Erik.Andersen at intecbilling.com> wrote:
> 
> So my questios are:
> 1) How can I make e2fsck skip reading a faulty journal (in my case there might be a HW error on the block) ?
> 2) What makes e2fsck act on a journal (is it because journal inode is set) ?
> 3) Shouldn't e2fsck act on wether the filesystem features (and in case of no 'has_journal' just ignore
>    any journal information - of course it still need to make sure the inode used for the journal isn't
>    used by anybody else) ?

This is a safety feature to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
If you are willing to throw away the changes in the journal that haven't been
committed to the normal locations yet, then you should be able to make some
changes to the journal to make it look like it is empty. You might even be able
to get away with just writing over the bad block. However, you really should
make an image of this partition before doing any writes to it. I don't know
what changes to make to the journal to make it appear empty.