FSCK on mounted partition

xdiman · 12-04-2005, 11:50 AM

Hello.
I used a Partition Magic to add more space to my root partition. But it halted, because of errors in partition. I booted Linux, printed "fsck /dev/hdb6", it said that it can cause severe filesystem damage, but I continued anyway... So, it halted with error, then any program could not be started.
I rebooted and got a kernel panic, because of inability to mount root fs. I booted Live-CD, tried to use fsck - but it said something like "This inconsistency could not be fixed by fsck. Use dumpe2fs -b and e2fsck -L filename". I know, that is because of bad blocks and I need to get list of it. But dumpe2fs failed with an error: "Root inode directory corrupted". Partition Magic's checker failed with a message "Inode 0 contains an illegal block 0".
I used R-Linux to recover my data, but all I saw were some multiplied remaining blocks of my data. After some fsck's, Partition Magic say that there is 37% bad blocks, and says that my partition contains illegal superblock. What can I do to recover my data and (maybe) partition?

acid_kewpie · 12-04-2005, 12:41 PM

hmm, so despite the "severe filesystem damage" warning you still did it??

if you've got a corrupted superblock then one of the few tricks i'd know would be to use parted to scan the rest of the partition to look for spare superblocks. not something i've done myself, but if it finds one you can fsck it (when it's *NOT* mounted... not that you can mount it of course...) providing the spare superblock with the -b option.

anomie · 12-04-2005, 12:55 PM

There is a howto here on discovering where your backup superblocks are: http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/in...howtopic=14152

This may or may not help you - sounds like over a third of the partition is wrecked.

Hope the lesson is not lost on you: never run fsck on a mounted filesystem.

xdiman · 12-05-2005, 01:28 PM

I used mke2fs -n /dev/hdb6 - it showed me the backuped superblocks.
I tried to fsck, and mount with -o sb=xxxxx, but it failed

I was inattentive, so I used to press 'y'...
Now I'll try find superblock using your method. But it also says me that my inodes are corrupted, their size might be 0... And many other errors.