From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752267AbZAFArU (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2009 19:47:20 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750972AbZAFArL (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2009 19:47:11 -0500 Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:37788 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750897AbZAFArK (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2009 19:47:10 -0500 Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 19:47:06 -0500 From: Theodore Tso To: Giangiacomo Mariotti Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Half-Disaster switching from ext3 to ext4 Message-ID: <20090106004706.GF14500@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , Giangiacomo Mariotti , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <12bfabe40901031923r3a828f71v74a8c6a56746b2ec@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <12bfabe40901031923r3a828f71v74a8c6a56746b2ec@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@mit.edu X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 04:23:42AM +0100, Giangiacomo Mariotti wrote: > the partitions(except for root obviously), I synced some times before > doing that and then I shut down the pc with a "shutdown -h -P now". > when I booted again the system, /dev/sda2(the partition with the most > important data. Murphy's law really works!) failed to get mounted with > a message saying something about corrupted groups(maybe, I don't > remember exactly). Trying to do a fsck.ext4 -p /dev/sda2, I got > something like : fsck.ext4 : Invalid argument while checking ext3 > journal for /dev/sda2. What version of e2fsprogs do you have installed, and can you dig up the exact error message at mount time? It should be in the your system logs.... > remounted it, all files were gone! I was starting to use the sleuth > kit, when I noticed that in the search+found directory there were > almost all the files, but not all of them and in a rearrenged > directory structure. Sounds like the root inode got zapped. As for why, it's hard to say. It could be a simple disk failure that happend as bad luck. I haven't seen any other bug reports that report corruption similar to yours, so without a lot more information or a way to reproduce the error, there's not much more I can say. Regards, - Ted