Recovering a damaged ext3 system, where to start?

[rodrigo at debian-am.org]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 01:27:02PM +0000, Thomas Beckett wrote:
> 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 
> 

fsck -cy /dev/hda1