[Gllug] ext3 disk recovery?

[Wulf Forrester-Barker]

I was doing so well with Linux at home - having had a fatal Windows
crash on what was my only home machine I ended up getting a couple of
new machines, a home network and installing Linux (Morphix) on an
alternative disk I put in the original machine.

It was great until Monday night when I did some work and then started
getting errors coming up. I managed to logout but couldn't properly
shutdown - I can't remember the exact error message but it was something
along the lines of a problem with the ext3 partition and data being
written beyond the end of it. On rebooting, hda wasn't even recognised
by the BIOS.

On Tuesday evening I booted up with the Morphix to try and run a fsck on
the disk but to no avail. Interestingly, the BIOS didn't see hda when I
first started the machine but seemed to have found it again after my
first round of efforts. I span up on the Morphix disk again and tried
repairing / mounting the partition again but with no success. The
messages coming back were about a bad superblock.

Any suggestions for how I might be able to access the drive? I don't
think I trust it enough to put it back into regular use and I haven't
got any vital unbacked up data on it, but there are a couple of files
I'd like to rescue if possible.

I've done some reading, such as the Partition Rescue mini-HOWTO, but
would be interested in ideas and experiences people could share. I can
see the disk if I type fdisk -l (or is that partition info, which looks
correct) coming from previously created records. Can I do something like
zap the superblock and then get access to extract data, even if that
would prevent the system from booting from hda?

Wulf
 

-- 
Wulf Forrester-Barker (Webmaster)
The Lewisham Hospital NHS Trust
http://www.lewisham.nhs.uk/


wulf.f-b at uhl.nhs.uk

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