fsck_ufs: cannot alloc %u bytes for inoinfo

[Gary Palmer]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 09:46:19PM +0100, Stan Behrens wrote:
> Thanks for that hint.
> 
> But it's not the dataloss which runs me writing here, it's this 3570453704 
> bytes (means 3.3 gigabytes of ram) it tries to alloc what confuses me.

Don't be confused.  You completely overwrote at least one cylinder
group and probably the direct/indirect blocks relating to the
root inode.  Overwriting the CG alone is enough to make the fs
unrecoverable through fsck, the further damage just adds more
nails to the coffin.

All that the error means is that fsck tried to read in the cylinder group,
got a garbage value for the number of inodes in use and tried to 
allocate enough memory to handle that.  

Could fsck_ffs be smarter about recovering from this?  Possibly.  
However, recovering a filesystem that go so thoroughly toasted is
better left to specialised data recovery tools.

Regards,

Gary