Hosed ext3 superblock

[Charles Bennett]

On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 06:56 -0700, Ling Cheung wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I'm an idiot.  
> 
> My ext3 root filesystem became corrupted recently due to power outages.  Like a moron, I don't have a backup of my most important files.
> 
> I've used dd_rescue to make an image of the disk on a portable hard drive and tried to fsck the image.  The root directory was lost, so the result was 65 GB of files in /lost+found with useless names.
> 
> I ran dd_rescue again and looked for alternate superblocks.  I couldn't mount using an alternate superblock.  I tried to use fsck on an alternate, but once again it wanted to resize the inode, so I quit rather than continue.  (dd_rescue takes six hours to image my disk, so I thought the low probability of success wasn't worth the effort.)
> 
> It seems to me that I'm out of my depth here.  I either have to take the disk to a data recovery specialist or find an ext3 guru in the area to help me out.  I'm willing to spend money to recover the disk, but I thought that someone who really understands ext3 could produce a better result than a data recovery shop.  I also thought that there must be such a person here in the Boston area.
> 
> If you have any suggestions or are willing to help me out, please let me know.  
> 
> Thanks, from a desperate moron.
> 
> Jesse Hughes
> 
> 

Dear Desperate -

If none of the superblock entries found with 'mke2fs -n' are working,
you can throw down fresh ones with 'mke2fs -s'.  This will not touch
the data, but it will obliterate superblocks.

Then fsck.  It will be very scary, but you may get a lot of it back.

ccb

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