[NBLUG/talk] Missing ReiserFS superblock!

[Bob Blick]

> After verifying that the RAID array was actually running (I've
> previously encountered similar errors when, for whatever reason, the
> array failed to start), I tried running reiserfsck with the "--
> rebuild-sb" option.  That seemed to work, although I neglected to
> make note of exactly what output it generated (apparently I didn't
> realize I might want to review it later).  I then tried again to
> mount the filesystem, and got the exact same superblock error!
>
> I've searched the Internet for any clues as to what kind of error
> might cause the superblock to be unreadable AND impossible to rebuild
> using the "--rebuild-sb" option.  So far, I've turned up absolutely
> nothing.
>
>
> Here's what I do know:
>
> * One of the pages I *did* turn up indicates that, if you run
> "reiserfsck --rebuild-sb" twice in a row, you can cause irreversible
> filesystem corruption.  If not for that, I might try it again, if for
> no other reason to re-examine its output for clues.  (Now I'm
> starting to think that the guys who used teletypewriters to interact
> with the early UNIX mainframes may have been on to something...)


Hi Lincoln,

ReiserFS ultimately screws up badly as I have found by personal experience
on two occasions. There are also other reasons to avoid it as others have
found out. In general it is being avoided.

But back to your current problem. If you want to run reiserfsck you need
to do it on a known good drive, not on the suspect drive(s). Reiserfsck
barely works at all, and not on bad hardware. You also need to protect
your data. So you must make a mirror on a new hard drive and work from
that. Hopefully you will come out better than I did. Reiserfsck lost .4%
of my files, but of the files and directories it did not lose, 15% of them
lost their original names and replaced them with a number, leaving me to
view each with a hex editor to try to figure out what each one was. Try
that yourself sometime with 30000 files.

BTW, I said I had two bad experiences with ReiserFS - one was on my main
set and the other was my backups :(

Best of luck to you. Get that stuff imaged on a new drive today. Then
switch to EXT3 which has mature tools.

Regards,

Bob