Problem in e2fsck ? read error in journal inode

[Erik Andersen]

Hi

I'm experiencing some problems on a harddisk (it has crashed for no known reason),
and in pursuit of getting some of the data out of the disk I'm learning to use the
e2fs progs package.

Origianlly I used version 1.38, but after experiencing segfaults in e2fsck -which now is solved,
I upgraded to 1.39, but now I have hit another problem (on another partition):

The partition was formatted as ext3, and debugfs / dumpfs showed that the feature 'has_journal' was present
(as expected).
The e2fsck command gave the following:

# e2fsck -B4096 -b32768  /dev/hda11
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /var

So it seemed like a problem in the journal, as I could not find any option to e2fsck to tell
it to skip applying (and reading) the journal, I set the filesystem festure 'has_jounal' off, using debugfs:

# debugfs -b4096 -s32768 -w /dev/hda11
debugfs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
debugfs:   feature -has_journal
Filesystem features: filetype sparse_super
debugfs:   show_super_stats -h
Filesystem volume name:   /var
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          2e8920a2-0460-4a87-b729-af812327fce7
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      filetype sparse_super
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         not clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
 :

Now trying e2fsck again did not make any difference:

# e2fsck -B4096 -b32768 -y /dev/hda11
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /var

I also tried to get tune2fs to turn off the journalling, but got the response:

 First turn 'has_journal' back using debugfs:

# debugfs -b4096 -s32768 -w /dev/hda11
debugfs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
debugfs:  feature has_journal
Filesystem features: has_journal filetype sparse_super
debugfs:  quit

 Then use tune2fs:

# tune2fs -O ^has_journal  /dev/hda11
tune2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
tune2fs: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while reading journal inode

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) ?
 
It was a bit long, if you need any more info - please let me know
One problem is that I have problems reading the raw partition 'dev/hda11' - I tried
to 'dd' it but it failed...

Regards

Erik Haukjær Andersen
 
 
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