What happens if the superblock is corrupted in linux

To that this works, you can boot from your primary HD or rescue with the damaged HD disconnected. Ignore error?

But this takes even more time! To try and save some time and since this is a second partition, not the boot partition, I think I should be able to attempt to mount the device.

If no error occurs I should be able to immediately see if the repair process worked by viewing my data. Another thing which might speed up the process is to start with the latest superblock backup, which I assume is the one with the greater number, what do you think? My wife did not make any backup the last 2 weeks she is teacher and everything is now against accessible. The most interesting is the date of posting which is the same as my birthday! You saved my life and my neck! Thanks a lot!

Thank you so, so much bro, you saved my day, im so fucking happy right now! Thank you for this. For me, I had to try 3 backup superblocks before I got one to work.

This was not the case for me. No way to correct it. It seams that e2fsck does nothing at all. After a couple of days of searching for answers and failed restore attempts, including redhat tech support, I was able to recover my 16TB partition with the TestDisk link.

I had everything fixed. I just wanted the OS to boot. I need help please. Recovery flag not set in backup superblock, so running journal anyway. Thanks for posting this how-to. I have now bookmarked your site. I finally tracked the problem down to a failing power connector to the hard drive. Changed the connector, problem fixed, and all data recovered. I hope you keep posting useful articles like this!! But, a synopsis is: I had a crash of some sort and the superblock is corrupted when I try to mount the partition where I have the data.

Nice huh? I guess I would appreciate it if you could just look it over and tell me if you think I could get to the data without finding a way to build a raid of one member or that I do have to find a way, or else kiss my data good bye. Mdadm seems to be controlling the superblock to some degree.

That maybe the superblock for the md device though. Any idea? LoL, obviously I knew that xxx was sdc in my case , still I got the error message! It gave an error message even though the drive was functioning normally? If it is successful, it should output something about no errors. I just reinstalled ubuntu My first question is whether your method above will work for me despite the empty directory structure having been written?

Presumably the old data is still there and hopefully can be recovered using a superblock backup. My second question is that I am guessing the various backups are from different occasions, is there any way to deduce their order of creation, ie: which is most recent?

Hmmm, interesting. Testdisk can be found on the Parted Magic disk, the link to which is above. Thanks a lot!! Hey, thanks a lot, I can now access my data! Testdisk is a great tool, I backed up my disk with it before attempting anything else. Every file is executable? I did use testdisk and recovered GB of data. Are you new to LinuxQuestions. If you need to reset your password, click here.

Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies. Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells!

With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use. Click here for more info. When I did ls -l mp3, it returned many? Then it returned this message: [snip] bash Or the filesystem superblock is corrupt The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. Originally Posted by ubyt3m3. Thank you for your reply jailbait.

At first, I ran fsck. After reading your post, I ran the commands with -t ext3 option but I got the same result. Does this mean it's really messed up and not recovable? I executed the cmd in single-user mode and no luck.

Any idea? Thanks in advance, gibb. Improve this answer. That's AUD, relative prices may be different in your location. Thank you for your answer. Actually there is a UPS, but the users tend to ignore that and just yank the power cord. Another reason is that we want the system to behave like an appliance router, webcam, etc , but the initial design has flaws root fs is not read-only, no battery, no power drop interrupt, etc.

I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require much hardware change. If total elimination is not possible, at least a reduced probability of corruption is good. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. This is called primary superblock, because this is the superblock that is read by the system when you mount the file system. As block groups are counted from 0, we can say that the primary superblock is stored at the beginning of block group 0.

As superblock is a very critical component of the file system, a backup redundant copy is placed at each "block group". In other words, every "block group" in the file system will have the backup superblock. This is basically done to recover the superblock if the primary one gets corrupted. You can easily imagine that storing backup copies of superblock in every "block group", can consume a considerable amount of file system storage space.

This option is by default enabled in latest system's, due to which you will see backup copies of superblock only on several block groups which is evident from the mke2fs output shown in the previous section. You can view superblock information of an existing file system using dumpe2fs command as shown below. You can also view the exact locations of superblock and backups using the same dumpe2fs command as shown below. The first thing to do is to do a file system check using fsck utility.

This is as simple as running fsck command against your required file system as shown below. If fsck output shows superblock read errors, you can do the below to fix this problem. First step is to Identify where the backup superblocks are located. This can be done by the earlier shown method of using dumpe2fs command OR using the below command also you can find the backup superblock locations. Read mke2fs man page for more information on this command line switch.

Second step is to simply restore the backup copy of superblock using e2fsck command as shown below. In the above shown example the number i have used is the location of the first backup copy of the superblock. Once the above command succeeds, you can retry mounting the file system. Alternatively you can also use sb option available in mount command. As mentioned earlier in the article, when you mount a file system, by default the primary superblock is read.

Instead you can force mount command to read a backup superblock in case the primary one is corrupted. Below shown is an example mount command using a backup superblock to mount a file system. The above shown mount command will use backup superblock located at block while mounting.

The second one may be that device is busy I mean may be some process is using that device so you kill that process Please check your using small "o" or Capital "O". Seems your using small o option instant of capital one. Sarath Pillai. Satish Tiwary.