Corrupted root inode on ext3 RAID - data recovery
 

I've recently had some issues with my file systems. I rebooted [as I do once in a while, despite running Linux], and it booted into a recovery console, as one of my file systems was not clean.

The file system in question is a RAID10 [4x250] setup with an ext3 partition on it. The array builds successfully. The fsck fails with the error message: "The root inode is not a directory". I'm not all that fluent with Linux in general, so I resort to asking questions like this. Is there any way to recover my data ?

My system is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R, e8400, 4GB DDR2 800, XFX 8800GT, everything's at stock speeds [I know, what kind of geek am I ?]. The drives in question are Seagate 250GB SATA IIs. The system boots fine if I remove the array in question from the fstab, but I can't see any way to recover the data on it. I have limited backups [perhaps 60% of the data], but they are not organized, and I'd rather not have to re-organize them again.

Any ideas ?

I'm guessing you answered Yes to clearing the root inode question?

If you've never done routine organized backups before you'll probably want too now that you're starting over from 60% data.

The 'clear inode' question was not an option that I have seen. I was instructed to try 'fsck -y' as there are several thousand errors, and this fails [and aborts] on the root inode error. I was looking for perhaps a more robust way to do this, if possible ?

As for routine backups, we've done them in the past, but we seem to keep killing machines, or getting general file system corruptions like this. Not sure the best way around that.