[sclug] ext2 disaster recovery

[Will Dickson]

Hi all,

I've just had a power brownout which took down my server for about half 
    a second. Now the root filesystem won't fsck.

Unfortunately, there are some important files on there, for which my 
backups are rather badly out of date :-(.

I have a linux workstn which fortunately wasn't affected, so I can move 
the drive containing the corrupt filesystem onto that as a secondary drive.

My questions are:

1. How do you mount a known-bad filesystem, i.e. force it to mount 
read-only without trying to fsck?

2. Are there any tips / tricks / hacks for this kind of situation?

3. What's the situation with ext3 these days? The last time I read about 
it, it was considered not quite ready for production use, but that was
a while ago. Am I correct in thinking that if I'd had ext3 rather than 
ext2 I wouldn't be in this mess?

All help gratefully received!

Will.