Superblock Corruption
 

I have and esata drive that I mounted to linux using an esata-usb cable. I see that sdb is available usning dmesg but the 3 partitions sdb1, sdb2 and sdb3 are not available. Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table


When I tried to mount I get an error that the superblock is corrupted. I tried to run fsck -p /dev/sdb on the HD and I get this:
Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct 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:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

Next I tried to get the superblocks with mkfs -n /dev/sdb and it fails - so I do not know the bacup superblocks.

I tried to run e2fsck using these standard superblock numbers but these commands also fail. so at this stage, I am unable to access these partitions - I know I had 3 partitions - one for linux and one for swap and third for data. Is there any way I can savlage the data partitions.

Thanks a lot for any assistance anyone can provide.

Sanjeev Taran






dumpe2fs /dev/sda2

This is a great tool to help http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Tried this - the problem is that the disk does not show up on windows or linux. I am using the esata-usb cable with the drive, the drive is not spinning.
Thanks for your reply.
-ST

That would worry me...is it an external thing? Check the power supply. Had that on my Prestige too. No spin-up.

Eh, just thinking out loud...got cool music here too... :)

Thor

You say the drive in not showing up, but, in you initial post you indicated that you were able to run fdisk against it, albeit with a erroneous result. Testdisk can be run against the raw disk just like you did with fdisk. It does not have to show up as a mounted partition (if that's what you mean?).

On Windows: I tried testdisk on windows.The drive is not showing up on the windows platform.
On linux I see sdb but not the sdb1, sdb2 and sdb3 partitions. fdisk on linux does not show the partitions - hence the error on linux

Both cases, I do not hear any spin.

Thanks for your responses.
-ST

What does the output of dmesg show and lshw (if installed)