ext3 corrupted

[Madison Kelly]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 05:37:19PM -0400, Marc Lijour wrote:
>> I have a drive that got corrupted (just before it started to send SMART 
>> alerts). I can't mount it and I get this error message:
>>
>> EXT3-fs error (device sda12): ext3_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 
>> 896 not in group (block 16777317)!
>>
>> I can't mount it as ext2 either, and I can't mount sda either. auto as type 
>> does not work either.
>>
>> Running fsck and accepting all actions with a 'y' seems to have no effect. I 
>> can't mount the disk and when I get to do fsck again I get the same actions.
>>
>> dd works.
>>
>> Do you know a way to get the data back?
>>
>> Thanks a lot (!)
> 
> Well you could try fsck with the -b 8193 option to tell it to use an
> alternate superblock.  Might work.
> 
> If the drive is actually going bad, certainly the advice of letting it
> cool off is a good one.  I actually managed to recover all the data from
> a failed drive for my sister that refused to even try to boot, by trying
> it out right after getting home in the middle of winter while the
> computer was probably at about -10C.  Read everything perfectly and got
> all the data of it and onto new dists (I replaced it with raid1).
> Didn't even get a single read error, it just ran perfectly.  I have read
> that a lot of recovery people will actually freeze the drive before
> trying to read it since it apparently works quite well in many cases
> without having to do anything complicated.

Just be careful to do the post-freeze DR in a low humidity environment! 
Condensation could make things worse, if you are not careful. :)

Madi
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