On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Mike B. <[email protected]> wrote: > Okay. Couldn't access sda3 or sda4 at all. It appears that wrecking the > superblock wrecks the OS. Nice.
Usually, the filesystem keeps backup copies of the superblock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2#ext2_data_structures That your system 1) was booting Windows and not Linux, 2) had a problem with the ext4 superblock on Linux, and 3) could/did not use the backup copy indicates that there may be something more serious going on. Some possible explanations: 1) Windows did something weird to a filesystems unfamiliar to it. 2) the hard drive is going bad 3) a bug in the ext4 driver 4) something else > I tried a number of different methods of > restoring Ubuntu from ubuntuforums.org and nary a one worked. When I booted > gparted it managed to see 9.10 as an operating system, but /home was just > formatted blank space. Ouch! Sorry to hear you lost your /home. Dunno what they said on the forums, but the general rule is to first figure out which partition holds what, check to see which ones need fixing, then fix those partitions. For example: # get a listing of the partitions $ sudo fdisk -l # get a listing of the partitions, UUIDs, and filesystem type $ sudo blkid | sort # check filesystem status, e.g. if sda3 is an ext2/3/4 $ sudo e2fsck -n /dev/sda3 # repair filesystem $ sudo e2fsck /dev/sda3 > Lesson: Don't be a moron. If I boot a system, let it boot. That would be a conservative approach. Although, I have my doubts that interrupting the boot process caused the problem. I routinely interrupt Linux at various points in the boot process and have done so with several different distos. Never had a problem. LInux handles those types of interruptions rather gracefully. Regards, - Robert -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
