[K12OSN] Re: Help! Please!

[Frank Samuelson]

You're a little light on details, but here goes

Ascension Tech wrote:
> Oh man, am I screwed!  I had a filesystem problem after a reboot
> saying 'extended attribute block...reference count 18 should be 17"
> for md2 .  I freaked out and ended up accidentally fscking up my md1
> array instead (I think may be /boot.  doe!).  Then it was saying "bad
> magic number in super-block".  Booting says after grub "VFS: can't
> find ext3 filesystem on dev md1". 

This is very odd. Fscking the disk shouldn't hurt it.  Was it
mounted at the time?

 > Linux Rescue from the cd can't find
> a file system at all but I think that may be sata driver related
> because knoppix sees some of it, thankfully the raid 1 partitions  of
> my /home.  

You're good then, no?

> Obviously I'm new to this and I wouldn't say this machine
> is in full production (planned for the 2nd semester).  But if it can't
> be saved I would like to save at least my /home directory, which has a
> webmin batch file of users as well as some peoples docs.  Can someone
> help me recover some or all this?  

Do you have a back-up of the partition (/boot?) that you
destroyed?  Or another machine with an identical partition
that you could copy?  Then you could reformat and dump the
backup.

> If I try and copy /home to another
> drive do I need knoppix to recognize it as a raid partition

This would probably be the safest thing to do.

> or can I
> just copy one since they are exactly the same size? 

As a matter of fact, you can.  A single device from a RAID1 drive
will mount and read like a regular drive, although I wouldn't
necessarily recommend it.  If you do this, you may want to mount it
read-only if you can.

 > For the original
> reference count error should I just have let it fix?

Probably, unless you know more about the structure of ext3
file systems than the people to wrote the program. :)