Hosed XFS drive?

[Peter King]

I was replacing a hard drive yesterday to install a newer drive with a
higher storage capacity, planning to copy the files from the uninstalled
drive by using an SATA/IDE USB 2 cable (a nifty little invention). All
was working fine until I deleted some symlinks on the uninstalled drive,
now connected by USB, when I started getting messages from the XFS file
system like "structure needs refreshing". Very odd. I unplugged it all
and went to bed.

Well, now this morning that particular partition on the uninstalled
drive Will Not Mount. No matter what, it tells me I have a bad
superblock. No problem, though -- that's the joy of journalling
filesystems, right? So I ran xfs_repair on the device as connected
over USB.

So xfs_repair correctly reports a damaged superblock, and then tries
to find the secondary to repair it. But then, somehow, the whole thing
fails: xfs_repair seems to get stuck in a loop, and dmesg fills up with
messages about a "dead drive" (by which it seems to mean that the
attempt to fix things at the low level has screwed up its ability to
communicate over USB).

Now I'm stuck. I can't mount or repair the relevant partition, it seems.

Anyone with any experience fixing XFS filesystems? Any ideas?



... and of course, this all happened as I was trying to install more
storage space to make proper backups... 

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
215 Huron Street
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5S 1A2
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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