could this be a zero-length partition?
 

Hello

Yesterday there was a shortage of electricity in my office and as a
consequence my linux didn't shutdown properly. Today when trying to
switch on the machine, linux complained about some problems with /dev/
hdb6 (/usr).

I have tried e2fsck -p /dev/hdb6 but the system returned "could this
be a zero-length partition?" . fdisk /dev/hdb showed the partition
as it supposed to be. I have also tried e2fsck -b xxxx to recover the
superblocks but to no avail. Even dd if=/dev/hdb6 of=/usr.img didn't work. Same error msg.

I have deleted the partition and re-created with the same size. This time I managed to get e2fsck to say that the (partition) system couldn't be recovered since blocks 0 to 3 were damaged, dd is working very very slow right now.

testdisk shows the partition and the superblocks but option p doesn't list any files (no file structure).

Is there anything else I can do to get it back to normal? I just need to copy a few files from it.

Is there anything else I can do?

Suggestions are most welcome.

Cheers

Ed

Depending on what type of files, you may be able to use testdisk's buddy, photorec, to recover the files from the drive image.