[ILUG] Recovering Reiser File System

[Conor Daly]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 11:01:04AM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Ciaran Mulloy thought:
> Hi,
> My reiser file system under Suse 9.2 got corrupted over the weekend and

This is why Niall O'Broin doesn't use reiserfs anymore...

It appears that reiserfs corruption has so often resulted in total data
loss that many users won't touch it.  Hopefully you'll be the test case
that proves it reliable...

> Because it's on a home machine I never bothered to do a backup. So no
> its sinking in how much data I am in danger of losing. 

Alas, this is where you lose soo much.  IMO, a home machine is at greatest
risk of data loss since work machines are typically:

o On a UPS and so not subject to power cuts
o Consolidated as to data storage, usually on a file server
o Of fairly recent vintage (rather than cobbled together with some old
  disks I had lying around) and so (maybe) more reliable.
o Backed up (at least the server(s) are,  hopefully...
 
> Is there a systematic way of being able to recover as much of the files
> as possible? I am very apprehensive of about trying to recover the files
> as there is a danger of making the current problem worse. 

Have a read of 'man reiserfsck' and see if it can help you.  'reiserfsck
--check' will do a check-only test on a read-only mounted filesystem.
This might be a good place to start...
 
> As I am not an experienced Linux hacker I would appreciate any advice on
> how to recover my files.

The first thing to do, if possible, is to make a bit image of the disk
onto another one.  Use 'dd if=/dev/hda of=<file on some other disk>'
assuming your bad disk is /dev/hda.  Then, when the other suggestions
screw up, you stand a chance of getting back to base for another attempt.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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