[wplug] fsck.ext3

[Frank W. Holden Jr.]

Jonathan S. Billings wrote:
> Frank W. Holden Jr. wrote:
>> HOWDY people. I have been having problems with a hard drive and I want
>> to get the data off of it. The problem is it tells me that it can not
>> read the super block, how can I figure out what the value is of the next
>> super block??? I seem to remember that it was a five digit number, but
>> for the life of me I can not remember what that number was when I
>> formatted the drive. Is there a sane way to figure this out??? OR do I
>> lose all my data???
>>
>> The hard drive is a Western Digital 160GB EIDE with 1 partition
>> formatted with ext3...
> 
> The location of the superblock depends on the block size that was used
> when creating the filesystem.  Most large filesystems are created with a
>  4k block size, so it'd be -b 32768.  If that doesn't work, try -b 8193
> (1k block size) and -b 16384 (2k block size).
> 
> If none of those work, make sure that the offset you are using is right,
> that the partition table is correct and that the disk's filesystem was
> *really* ext3.
>
Thanks for responding so fast Jonathan!

I have tried all 3 of these values and get the same answer:

<-QUOTE->
frankh at mach4:~$ sudo fsck.ext3 -b 32768 /dev/hdc1
e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdc1

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the 
superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an 
alternate superblock:
     e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
</-QUOTE->

This drive worked up until 3-4 days ago... I noticed at that time that 
it came up for an auto check because of the number of mounts. I had to 
reboot to bring up the new kernel upgrade. It was checked and mounted. 
I added files to it and the next day boot up, since that point it 
hasn't worked. If it helps, the only thing that has been done to it is 
moving files onto it from a W2K machine via Samba prior to the 
incident nearly daily...

Any other takers for this problem?
Frank