Recovering a damaged ext3 system, where to start?

[Neil Woolford]

Hi,

As longer serving members of this list may recall, I have set my non-geek 
brother
in France up with an Ubuntu system, which I am maintaining for him from 
England.

We have identical hardware, and by sods law it is his system that has 
crashed, leaving
a corrupted filesystem.  I'll therefore have to deal with it either by 
talking him through the
recovery process on the phone or he'll have to send the hard drive to me so 
I can mount
it in my machine and work on it.

The symptom is that the system reports a damaged filesystem on booting, 
then runs an
automatic check, which fails.  The system then stops with a prompt and the 
suggestion
to run fsck manually, and a warning that the file system is mounted read only.

My problem is that I've not used fsck, and don't have a broken system to 
test it on...

I need advice:

Firstly;  where to find a howto for fsck as a recovery tool, starting with 
simple issues like whether
I should be running it off Knoppix or the Ubuntu Live CD - I assume this is 
the way to go as then
the filesystem being mended is not in use so nothing will try to write to 
it during the recovery;

Secondly;  is this likely to be a process I can talk a non techy ('which is 
the return key?') brother
through, or should I just get him to pack the hard drive well and post it 
to me?

I don't mind learning about fsck myself, but there could be tears and grey 
hairs in doing it over
the phone via my brother and his computer.

Neil

PS  I think I've answered my own question about sending the disc back to 
me.  It is the way to
go *unless* the fsck process is very simple indeed.  As the automatic 
version has failed already,
I guess it is not likely to be easy.


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