I would like to suggest that the rescue disk should include a newer version of ext2 tools in order to better support ext3 journal recovery. I created the boot floppy and tried to run e2fsck on some improperly unmounted ext3 partitions. It spit back some errors about unsupported options and bad superblocks. When I found another rescue floppy (ramf) which included a newer e2fsck, it happily ran the journal file on each partition and I was back in business in a few seconds. I am happy that I resisted the temptation to run the older e2fsck with the 'force' option. BACKGROUND
I run a custom 2.4.17 kernel with built-in ext3 support. At some point I installed the latest stock redhat kernel package, 2.4.9 without ext3 support, and forgot to reset the links in /boot to point to my own kernel image. Fast-forward a couple of months. I froze my machine and had to do a hard reset. This was the first time in a VERY long time that I have had to do that. Anyway, kernel 2.4.9 refused to boot because the needs_recovery flag was set on all the ext3 partitions. Not knowing what was going wrong, I booted the tomsrtbt floppy. Running e2fsck left me with a sick feeling in my stomach. I feared that the hard disks had become seriously corrupted because it did not immediately recognize that the journal files needed to be run. Perhaps forcing the older e2fsck to run on my partitions would have fixed the problem. But I was nervous about doing that before trying some other recovery steps. Anyway, when I started to suspect that the only problem was due to the journals, I found a rescue floppy with some more up-to-date tools. sc
