disk recovery problem(s)

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 02:48:41PM -0500, Robert Huff wrote:
> 
> 	Had a power outage recently; when trying to fsck several
> external hard drives I'm getting unexpected errors.
> 	For example:
> 
> huff@>> fsck /dev/da3a
> ** /dev/da3a
> ** Last Mounted on /backup
> ** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
> ** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
> ROOT INODE UNALLOCATED
> ALLOCATE? [yn] 
> 
> 	a) what's probably happened?

Error messages are explained in Appendix A of
/usr/share/doc/smm/03.fsck/paper.ascii.gz

Unfortunately it says that this error "should never happen". :-/

Is the drive connected by USB? Some USB disk interface chips are quite quirky.

> 	b) is there a way to recover the data?

Answer y, and all directorys and files found in the root will appear in
lost+found, unless the attempt to allocate the root inode fails.. 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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