Re: Corruption: --fix-fixable results in all nlink values = 0

[Gerrit Hannaert <degerrit@web.de>]

Hi again,

I skimmed over the bad-block-handling page but it's not very clear what you 
should do if a filesystem already exists, as is obviously the case with me. 
Are these badblock patches in the newer kernels, by the way?

Anyway, my first instinct told me to try Maxtor's 'Powermax' tool, and lo and 
behold the 'Advanced Test' here found errors, and 'fixed' them, whatever that 
means. (Can you believe these guys make you download a 3MB Windows executable 
in order to write a 1.44Mb floppy image which is less than half full?? I had 
to bloody install Windows for this... grr....)

Anyway, this time 'reiserfsck --rebuild-tree' finished successfully, and I was 
able to see my filesystem for the first time in 2 days and many hours of 
sweating. 
Here's the pretty impressive summary of errors:

Pass 0:
Loading on-disk bitmap .. ok, 12812325 blocks marked used
Skipping 8749 blocks (super block, journal, bitmaps) 12803576 blocks will be 
read
...
        "r5" hash is selected
Flushing..done
        Read blocks (but not data blocks) 12803576
                Leaves among those 86209
                        - corrected leaves 1
                Objectids found 382476

Pass 1 (will try to insert 86209 leaves):
Looking for allocable blocks .. ok
...
Flushing..done
        Leaves inserted item by item 170
Pass 3 (semantic):
####### Pass 0 #######
pass0: vpf-10420: block 983630, item (61), make 4459536 4462153 0x1 IND (1) 
fixed to DIRECT
"r5" got 382518 hits
####### Pass 1 #######
is_leaf_bad: block 983630L 60-th item (4459536 4462153 0x1 IND (1), len 28, 
location 1792 entry count 0, fsck need 0, format new) and the next
 one (4459536 4462153 0x7001 IND (1), len 280, location 1512 entry count 
65535, fsck need 0, format new) are in wrong order
pass1: (is_leaf_bad) bad leaf (983630)
####### Pass 2 #######
...
Flushing..done
        Objects without names 185
        Empty lost dirs removed 602
        Dirs linked to /lost+found: 12
                Dirs without stat data found 60
        Files linked to /lost+found 161
        Objects having used objectids: 10
                files fixed 66
                dirs fixed 3
Pass 4
Deleted unreachable items 5
Flushing..done
Syncing..done
###########
reiserfsck finished at Sat Aug 17 02:20:46 2002

I think I will spend the next week working out a better backup solution...

Will Reiserfs4 have better bad block handling than this? When I see all the 
trouble involved in rescuing this filesystem, as much as I'm impressed with 
it I would think twice about using Reiserfs on any non-redundant (and 
certainly IDE) disks from now on. I hope I don't make any enemies by saying 
so.

Cheers, and thanks for all your help, especially Vitaly!

- Gerrit