Linux: troubleshooting ext3 superblock

Linux: troubleshooting ext3 superblock








Superblock


Accessing a Damaged Ext3 File System


Sometimes things go wrong and after an error you are incapable of accessing your file system anymore. If it is an ext2 or ext3 file system, there is a way to access it anyway, even if at first sight you can't. In this article you'll learn how to benefit from advanced mount options that allow you to access data that you may have considered lost.


In order to access a file system, you need the superblock. This is a 1 kilobyte block that contains all metadata about the file system and this data is needed to mount the file system. It normally is the second 1 K block on an ext3 file system. In the listing below you can see a part of the contents of the superblock as displayed with the debugfs utility:


Filesystem volume name: <none>

Last mounted on: <not available>

Filesystem UUID: 09979101-96e0-4533-a7f3-0a2db9b07a03

Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53

Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)

Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr filetype

needs_recovery sparse_super large_file

Default mount options: (none)

Filesystem state: clean

Errors behavior: Continue

Filesystem OS type: Linux

Inode count: 5248992

Block count: 10486428

Reserved block count: 524321

Free blocks: 3888202

Free inodes: 4825213

First block: 0

Block size: 4096

Fragment size: 4096

Blocks per group: 32768

Fragments per group: 32768

Inodes per group: 16352

Inode blocks per group: 511


Now the problem arises if due to some error, the superblock isn't accessible anymore. Fortunately, some backup copies of the superblock are written on the ext3 file system by default. Using these backup copies, you can still mount a file system that you may have considered lost otherwise. The actual position on disk of the first backup of the superblock, depends on the size of the file system. On modern large file systems, you will always find it at block 32768. To access it, you can use the mount option -o sb. The issue however is that mount expects you to specify the position of the superblock in 1024 bytes blocks, whereas the default block size for a modern ext3 volume or partition is 4096 bytes. Therefore, to tell the mount command where it can find the superblock, you have to multiply the position of the superblock by 4; which would result in the block value 131072 in most cases. If for example your /dev/sda5 file system would have a problem, you can try mounting it with the command mount -o sb=131072 /dev/hda5 /somewhere.


Now that you have mounted the problematic file system and thus limited the scope of the problem to the superblock, it is time to fix the problem. You can do this by copying the backup superblock back the the location of the old superblock. You can do that using dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/dev/hda5 bs=1024 skip=131072 count=1 seek=1. Once finished, your file system is accessible again in the way it was before. Problems mounting ext3 file systems often occur because of a problem in the administrative information at the beginning of the file system. If the problem comes from the superblock, you can mount the file system anyway, using a backup superblock and the mount option -o sb. Using dd, you can even restore the superblock to its original location.










if you get this error






/dev/sda2: Input/output error
mount: /dev/sda2: can't read superblock






than go through this link