Recovering a damaged ext3 system, where to start?

[fberbain at xs4all.nl]

Hi,

> 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 had exactly the same situation last week (automatic fsck that fails,
then shell). I didn't know anything about fsck either. If you type fsck -h
(or any invalid option) in the shell you get a (quick) help page for fsck.

I ended up doing fsck /dev/hda1 (which was the affected partition). I
answered yes (the default) to all questions fsck asked (quite tedious,
there is an option to tell fsck to do it automatically). The point being,
I still don't know anything about fsck, but apparently it succeeded in
fixing my filesystem: the system booted normally after the check, and I
haven't noticed any lost or corrupted files since then.

I'm also told that if fsck can't fix everything, you might find some of
your stuff in the lost+found directory. In my case, it was empty (but
then, I don't think I lost anything).

I hope it works for your brother as well as it did for me.

Groetjes,
Florence