harddrive won't mount: bad magic number in superblock

sohmc · 01-17-2006, 10:39 PM

I just installed ubuntu for the first time...(moving on from fedora, or trying to at least.)

It seems that the installation might have overwritten one of my hard drives and knocked out a partition table or something...not really sure.

when I try to mount, fsck, or anything, it says "bad magic number in superblock".

The drive contains some pretty important information and would like to retreive it. Can anyone help me out with this?

Thanks!

bigrigdriver · 01-17-2006, 11:26 PM

The system automatically checks the first copy of the superblock. If it's corrupted somehow, you would get the 'bad superblock' error. There are copies of the superblock at 8K increments on the drive.

This article may help you recover from a good superblock somewhere else on the disk.

http://www.bellevuelinux.org/superblock

sohmc · 01-18-2006, 07:35 AM

bigrigdriver, THANKS SO MUCH!

That did it!