Receiving mounting errors on different systems: critical production machine inoperative!

[Dotan Cohen]

I am receiving this error when mounting my disks:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda4,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so


Background: I have two Kubuntu systems in regular use in my family.
The first machine, a desktop running Kubuntu 8.10, started giving this
error a few days ago, when mounting partitions that until that moment
had mounted fine in the past. There are two IDE hard drives in that
machine, and partitions from both drives started giving the errors. As
the machine was overdue for a 9.04 install I simply reinstalled, and
the issue disappeared.

The second machine, a Dell laptop running 9.04, has four partitions on
it's SATA drive and just this morning I started getting the same error
on it when mounting one of the partitions. I had to power the machine
down and when I powered it back up, it booted into a text console and
is giving me the error because it cannot mount the /home partition.

 All my partitions are jfs and mounting them with the -t jfs flag does
not help. I suspect a recent kernel update as it affected two separate
machine at nearly the same time, but older kernels and even the 8.04
and 9.04 LiveCDs are throwing this error. I stress that this is on two
different machines. What can I do? The laptop has some critical work
that had not been backed up this week, so it is rather important to me
to save it.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il