[Hoary] Can't Read EXT3 Journal

[Scott Henson]

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 21:56 -0400, David M. Carney wrote:
> So much for recoverable file systems.
> 
> I had a hard lockup. Not sure what caused it. I was scrolling through
> my mail in Evolution and it locked up tight.
> 

The reason sounds like your drive going south.

> At first I could switch to a console via ctrl-alt-f1 but when I tried
> to switch back to X, the keyboard was locked.
> 
> I could find no other way to recover but via the reset button.
> 
> Upon reboot the stock i386 kernel couldn't find the ext3 journal and
> the reboot process stopped.
> 
> I tried recovery mode, but just got a lot of drive seek errors and a
> kernel panic at the end.

These drive seek errors and kernel panics are tell tale signs of a drive
going bad.  That means your data may have already been lost and having
backups might be good right now.

> 
> I know how to use a rescue disk to get back into my Hoary system, if
> indeed this is even possible. If so, is there a command line way to
> rebuild the journal?

To my knowledge, fsck should be able to fix this and it should be run
over unclean file systems at boot time.  The journal isn't really all
that special but for recovery time and if the journal is corrupt, it
should just fsck the entire disk.  

A good way to get the disk mounted and get your data off of it is to
mount it as an ext2fs.  Ext2 is Ext3 without a journal.  You should just
be able to use the same command youve been using to mount the ext3fs and
substitude ext3 with ext2.  

I would move everything off the disk as soon as possible.  

-- 
Scott Henson <scotth at csee.wvu.edu>
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