On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Madison Kelly wrote: Hi Maddy. I hope you got some sleep last night...

I know that backups of the superblock are made, do you know by chance how to locate them and/or how to tell the OS to use one for mounting? Also, at

No one mentioned this (and I didn't read TLUG yesterday) so here it is: /sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hdxy (where xy is a1, b2, etc) will give you this info. There is quite a lot of output so redirect it to a file and read it with less, eg: /sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hde3 > /tmp/hde3.info Search for the word "Superblock" Now, take that number and use it with e2fsck -b, Eg I have "Superblock at 163840" listed for /dev/hde3, so I could try: e2fsck -b 163840 /dev/hde3. Remember to only work on backup copies! See below.

least two partitions on the drive have gone bad...

Different filesystems (partitions) being bad makes it far less likely it is a filesystem problem. Also, the use of dd was mentioned. This is good but there is no need to write it to a physical drive. You can write the dd to a file and mount it using loopback and attempt recovery on that. As long as you keep a good copy of the filesystem file around you can keep trying things over and over on copies. Good luck. Rob -- Robert Brockway Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd. Phone: 416-669-3073, Email: rbrockway-wgAaPJgzrDxH4x6Dk/4f9A at public.gmane.org, http://www.opentrend.net OpenTrend Solutions: Reliable, secure solutions to real world problems. -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml