Superblocks bad, and can't be restored from backups?
 

Hello,

I have been unable to boot my Xubuntu 11.10 almost all day. The problem started with my primary hard drive not being recognized as I detailed in a post here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...7/#post4657486

I took a break from this problem for a couple of hours, and when I went back and booted again from the same Parted Magic cd, the disk was back.

However, I still can't boot. I have run e2fsck, and after a long time, it tells me it couldn't find a valid filesystem superblock, and that an attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in a short read error while trying to open /dev/sda1. This is the same thing it always tells me when my superblocks need restoring, except it usually only takes a couple of seconds.

When I try to restore them with e2fsck, however (after getting the block locations with mke2fs -n), with every block number I try it says:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a valid 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.

The thing is, I have an ext4 filesystem and not ext2, but this happens to me every two weeks and this is how I always have been able to fix it. Should I do something else?

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

If its happening regularly, your disk may be going bad; try this http://linux.die.net/man/8/smartctl

Thank you, but I must confess the information at this link is beyond my level. Is there another resource that will give me a non-expert translation of how to use this to find out if my disk is going bad?

Also, I was able to mount my disk (though it still will not boot), so now at least I can get the bit of data I hadn't backed up off. Now I just need to figure out if the disk is worth keeping before I reinstall.

Thanks again.

try to restore the OS from your CD ROM or USB

I'm sorry, but while I do appreciate all input that is intended to be helpful, that comment is just absurdly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Restore the OS? What does that mean--reinstall? I have already said I will reinstall. My question is how to go about finding out if the disk is bad before I do so.

Can anyone give me some advice or guidance on this?

Thanks.

Have not found a solution yet, but I think it is the hard disk. Waiting for the manufacturer's tool to check. Marking thread as solved since I will not be revisiting it again.