lost a drive?

[Dave Stevens]

Quoting Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>: 
 
Thanks, Tony, see below... 
 
> At 3:38 PM -0700 9/23/06, Dave Stevens wrote: 
> >Quoting Keith <ac7xc1nx at gmail.com>: 
>   ... 
> >  >  Obtain the rescue CD, boot without mounting the partition and do a 
> >  > fsck.ext3 /dev/hd## with the hard drive unmounted. 
> >  > 
> > 
> >Thanks but no joy. I get: 
> > 
> >e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004) 
> >e2fsck: Bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/hdb2 
> >The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 
> >filesystem. 
> >If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not 
> swap 
> >or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt and you might try 
> >running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: 
> >e2fsck -b 8193 <device> 
> > 
> >So I've done that and get the same message repeatedly with or without the 
> -b 
> >parameter. Are there other alternate superblocks? copies? data recovery 
> >utilities? 
>  
> There are lots of alternate superblocks.  See man e2fsck and man  
> mke2fs with reference to -b -n. 
 
gives this: 
 
linux:/sbin # e2fsck -n /dev/hda2 
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004) 
Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks... 
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda2 
 
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock 
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: 
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device> 
 
I don't understand the severity of this problem. If my data on the drive is 
irretrievably lost I will reluctantly reformat, install FC5_64 to replace the 
FC3 now missing in action and life will carry on. I have a backup of my mail 
and docs from ten days ago so it won't be a catastrophe. 
 
But if the fix is only obscure and not too time consuming I'd rather put in 
the time to both learn what went wrong and to recover my installation to where 
it is possible to do a more recent backup at least. 
 
 
I am currently running from a SUSE Linux 9.2 Live CD. In that environment YAST 
recognizes the partition (hda2, as you may have gathered) as an LVM volume, 
but that's as far as I get. I think the difficulty with using alternative 
superblocks is related to the block size and that the alternative superblocks 
are ?only? applicable to other block sizes. The block size in that partition 
has always been reported by df and du in 1K increments. 
 
Ideas? further suggestions? reading I can do online on this? 
 
Dave 
 
 
 
 
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