On 4 Mar 2005, at 21:16, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> The root partition (/dev/hda3) on my laptop
> is not longer recognised as a valid filesystem.
> (When I run "fsck /dev/hda3" from a rescue CD
> I am told "Could not determine filesystem type"
> while "e2fsck /dev/hda3" tells me
> "The superblock could not be read ...",
> and suggests I try an alternative superblock
> with "e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda3".
> However, this brings up the same message.
>> Is there anything I can do short of re-installing the system
> (Fedora-3)?
Restore from your backups?
>> I thought there were lots of copies of the superblock,
> but how does one tell where they are?
One does mke2fs -n <OPTIONS> /dev/hda3
where <OPTIONS> are the same options originally used to create the
filesystem e.g. -m, -i, -j
If, as is likely, you don't recall what those are, just use the
defaults - things can't get any worse. If /dev/hda3 was ext3, then do
mke2fs -n -j /dev/hda3
otherwise just do
mke2fs -n /dev/hda3
These do the actions of mke2fs without actually writing to disk, and so
they will print a list of alternate superblocks which you can offer to
e2fsck -b.
> I await the wisdom of the ILUG gurus with bated breath.
You can let the CO2 out now. But a word of warning - this is unlikely
to help a whole lot. In maybe 8 years using Linux, and 18 using Unix, I
have NEVER seen the use of an alternate superblock do any good.
Niall
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