On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Arun Khan <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have an external WD 1TB hard disk with a XFS file system.  It used
> to be mounted to my desktop via an e-sata port on the mobo.
...
> Anyway,  I have hooked up the 1TB device to my temporary desktop via
> USB and the kernel is not reporting any error.
>
> However, there are file system errors and it refuses to mount.
>
> Using SystemRescueCD I have tried to repair the FS with the following:
>
>                            xfs_repair -v -L /dev/sdf1

XFS fsck requires a LOT of RAM to check large file systems.  Please
ensure you have at least 2GB of RAM on your system and are running
a 64bit kernel and userland.  It's also good to have adequate swap
mounted -- you don't want xfs_check to run out of RAM midway.

I always "xfs_check" first to identify errors.  Then try a dry run with
"xfs_repair -n" before turning xfs_repair loose.


> I see no output on the console (even after letting it run for a couple
> of hours) and I am unable to break out of the session (Cntrl-C).

USB is very slow, so a lot of patience is required :-)  Or hook up the
HDD to your internal SATA controller and rerun fsck.

xfs_repair is probably stuck on kernel IO so Control-C is not stopping
it.  If you don't see any disk activity, it should be safe to reboot the box
and try the above.


> I have also done ddrescue to extract about 150GB of the FS and try to
> repair the extracted file - no success.

Do you have a full image of the XFS partition?  What is the size of your
XFS partition.

If you have LVM setup, suggest that you create a snapshot before running
xfs_* so you can revert in case things do not go as planned.


Not to discourage you but my experience in recovering XFS has mostly met
with limited success.  xfs_repair renames the files with their inode numbers
and generally creates a mess.  I've often had to reinstall IRIX after
a file system
corruption.

XFS requires stable hardware and power to function well.  Further more,
for single disk setups, the performance advantages of XFS over other file
systems is not all that significant.  So for removable disks, it's highly
recommended that you consider ext3/ext4 in future.

- Raja
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