So recently I had a failure for an Ext3 file system. I do not know what caused the problem but now I am at the state where when I attempt to run e2fsck it tells me that the superblock is bad and no backup superblock can be found. I attempted running it with the standard backup block numbers and the -b argument but to no avail.

I may have found additional backup superblocks using a technique I read about online. What I read was that if you use the same binary to write the file system with the same block size it will write the backup superblocks to the same place. Using those numbers the e2fsck command got further, but warned of data loss if it continued. I am currently making a backup of the FS so that I can test out the procedure.

I guess the lesson is to keep the journal on a different drive when you have a journaled file system because the mounting of the file system is a single point of failure.

Does anyone else have any experience with ext2|3 recovery?

No, not Ext3 specifically. Damn that sucks. Best of luck. Looks like you're going about the problem well.

If you make a new ext3 filesystem on an identical but different drive/partition it will tell you where your backup superblocks are. You can even "format" an identically sized file if you have somewhere to put a file that big.

One more thing, you can try dumpe2fs to find the superblocks if the filesystem isn't too hosed. If it's really broken then you'll need to try the stuff above.

Posted by Washu One more thing, you can try dumpe2fs to find the superblocks if the filesystem isn't too hosed. If it's really broken then you'll need to try the stuff above.

Thanks, I will check that out. If all fails I am going to start diving into the specification for ext3. Worst case scenario I can probably write something to recognize the headers/magic numbers for specific file types and use that to scrape the data.