Re: Superblock or partition table is corrupt

> As I boot my Ubuntu system, I eventually get this error on a 500gb disk I
> recently installed to archive my collection of movie ISOs:
>
> /dev/sda1: clean, 93441/61063168 files, 92620501/122096000 blocks
>
> Movies: The filesystem (according to the superblock) is 122096000 blocks
>
> The physical size of the device is 97677200 blocks
>
> Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!
>
> Movies: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY, RUN fsck MANUALLY

   I'm certainly no expert on filesystem repairs but I've had this type of
thing happen a few times over the last dozen or so years and been able to
recover the filesystem with e2fsck.

   You have to unmount the disk first and then run e2fsck on it. There are
several options that you can use .. you can run first without any
repairing to see just what fsck says is wrong:

     e2fsck -Vn /dev/sda1

This will give verbose output and *not* do any filesystem repairs. Or, if
you're feeling lucky (I always do this .. life in the fast lane):

     e2fsck -Vy /dev/sda1

If fsck chokes and says that the superblock is corrupted then you can
possibly restore it from a backup copy:

   dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 | grep super

will tell you where the backup copies are. Then do:

   e2fsck -b xxxxxx /dev/sda1

where xxxxxx is one of the superblock copies from dumpe2fs.

   There are lots of pages on the interweb for this type of thing. I'm
looking at http://linuxgazette.net/issu32/tag_superblock.html at the
moment.

   Good luck.

Keith Brown
Department of Chemistry/
Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Center
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

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Received on Tue Jan 8 09:03:41 2008