Corrupt Superblock on /home

[Nancy Merckle]

Hi,

I still haven't been able to boot up my FC4 box, beyond repair mode 
without a live distro CD.  The attempt gave me errors on /home with 
something along the lines of (from my notes):
 	Buffer I/O error on device hdb1
 	/dev/hdb1 reaad failed after 0 of 2048 at 0
 	No Volume group found

Using the live distro, I was able to determine that all of hdba will mount 
(except hdba3 which is swap space) along with hdb2, my /data directory. 
All mounted and I could see the files on /dev/hda1 (/boot), /dev/hda2 
(/1), /dev/hda4 (/data1), /dev/sda1 (usb drive) and /dev/hdb2 (/data). 
The plan was to have OS files on hda and most/all data on hdb so that if 
the OS disk got hosed data wouldn't be lost.

I tried "mount /dev/hdb1 -vt ext3 /mnt/hdb1" and got

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
        missing codepage or other error
        In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
        dmesg | tail  or so

root at 2[root]# dmesg | tail
Buffer I/O error on device hdb1, logical block 7
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=63, high=0,
low=63, sector=63
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 63
FAT: unable to read boot sector
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=65, high=0,
low=65, sector=65
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 65
EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock

I can't remember the command I used next, but I wound up getting the 
result of a "bad magic number in superblock"

When I went back to repair mode, the file system start up gives clean 
report on /1, /boot, /data and /data1.

I tried e3fsck, e2fsck with both the -cc and -t options followed by 
similar commands with plain fsck.  This last try at fsck -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 
gave me "Attempt to read block from file system resulting in short read 
while trying to open /dev/hdb1. Could this be a zero-length partition? 
I've even tried these commands on /dev/hdb and all I got was a little 
longer wait time before the bad news.

I'm getting to the end of everything I can think of to do.  My next bright 
idea is to try to change the partition names from /data1 to /home and 
making hdb1 /<something else> to verify that the OS is still working and 
perhaps get me back and running (although at a diminished capacity) while 
I learn and research.  I've even toyed with the idea of installing windoze 
on the /data1 drive to see if I could get some sort of windoze disk data 
rescue software to retreive what I could of hdb1.  Unless there has been 
some magic discovery of a software retrival package for linux since the 
last time it was discussed on this list.

Can someone please help me save my /home directory or is it totally hosed?

Thanks,

Nancy


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