fsck.ext4 taking months

[Christian Brandt <brandtc@psi5.com>]

Situation: External 500GB drive holds lots of snapshots using lots of
hard links made by rsync --link-dest. The controller went bad and
destroyed superblock and directory structures. The drive contains
roughly a million files and four complete directory-tree-snapshots with
each roughly a million hardlinks.

Tried

e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
        Benutze EXT2FS Library version 1.41.12, 17-May-2010

e2fsck 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
        Benutze EXT2FS Library version 1.41.11, 14-Mar-2010

Symptoms: fsck.ext4 -y -f takes nearly a month to fix the structures on
a P4@2,8Ghz, with very little access to the drive and 100% cpu use.

output of fsck looks much like this:

File ??? (Inode #123456, modify time Wed Jul 22 16:20:23 2009)
  block Nr. 6144 double block(s), used with four file(s):
    <filesystem metadata>
    ??? (Inode #123457, mod time Wed Jul 22 16:20:23 2009)
    ??? (Inode #123458, mod time Wed Jul 22 16:20:23 2009)
    ...
multiply claimed block map? Yes

Is there an adhoc method of getting my data back faster?

Is the slow performance with lots of hard links a known issue?

-- 
mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Christian Brandt EDV-Dienstleistungen
Tel 089/89427711, Fax 089/89427712
Kreuzlinger Str.37 82110 Germering
St.Nr. 117/206/91819 Ust-ID DE233256795
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