Erich Schubert: Lost an ext3 filesystem
These days, something happened to one of my external USB drives that I so far
only knew from ReiserFS (which I since called ReisswolFS, German word play on
"shredder" ...). But, it's not ext3 which I blame.Short story what happened:
- Resumed the system from 'suspend'.
- I copied some files onto the first file system.
- I copied the same files to a second external disk (dual backup...)
- I copied some files from the first disk, which caused an access-beyond-end-of-disk, mounting the filesystem read only
- Unmounted the filesystem, started e2fsck
- Started copying the files from the secondary filesystem
- Got the same error on the second disk.
- Cancelled e2fsck doing more damage to the first disk.
- Shutdown and reboot
- Memcheck, three iterations. Nothing.
- Checked second disk, no errors in filesystem (!), copied the files I had issues accessing just fine.
- Filesystem on disk #1 seriously trashed.
- Had ext2fsck try to recover filesystem on disk #1
- Pretty much all data on disk #1 is now in lost+found, it seems as if all major folders were corrupted. Lots of corrupted file entries (character devices with random permissions and numbers) there, too.
- Reformat disk #1, and restore it from the other backup (Extra backup for teh win! I also have a 3rd copy of about 2 months ago off-site)