[long] major problems on fs; e2fsck running out of memory

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2014 at 07:43:12PM -0700, Keith Keller wrote:
> 
> That's clearly a spurious error, so I checked dmesg:
> 
> [159891.225762] EXT4-fs (dm-0): get root inode failed
> [159891.227436] EXT4-fs (dm-0): mount failed

The "get root inode failed" is rather unfortunate.

Try running "debugfs /dev/dm0"

and then use the "stat /" command.

You can use debugfs to look at the file system and recover individual
files without needing to mount it.  However, if the root directory has
been compromised, that makes using debugfs quite a bit more difficult.
You can look at inodes by inode number by surrounding them with angle
brackets.  i.e., if you want to look at inode 12345, you could say
"stat <12345>", and if you inode 12345 is a directory, you could list
it via "ls <12345>", etc.  See the debugfs man page for more details.

       	   	     	       	   	   - Ted