Recovering a damaged ext3 system, where to start?

[Thomas Beckett]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 13:08:32 +0000, Neil Woolford
<neil at neilwoolford.co.uk> wrote:
> 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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I had this problem a while ago and off the top of my head you can
simply get your brother to insert the Live CD - either Knoppix or
Ubuntu Live CD (any will do). Once it has finished booting, bring up a
terminal and run fsck /dev/hda1 (or whatever the partition that is
broken is) - Ie. YOu cant run fsck when the partition is mounted. -
just change /dev/hda1 to the affected partion and add any options that
may be needed (read man page) - thats it. It will go through and ask
you if you want to fix any errors that it finds. you can easily walk
him through it over the phone...

1. put Live CD in and boot it.
2. right click desktop and select open terminal
3. type "fsck /dev/hda1" 
4. wait a while and select yes to fix stuff -can probably get it to
auto yes with options
5. reboot without the Live CD in and see if all is ok

Hope it helps 

Tom