Topic: Bad Superblock Recovery?

[jimgoode]

This is not really an SME problem. However, I am running SME 6.0.1-01 (by way of an upgrade from 5.6) and the root partition drive crashed this morning. When the system hung it was trying to write to /var/log/smtpfront-qmail/current. The screen showed geometry and read errors on hda.

Now, for my question: Can a superblock be recreated?

I have installed 6.0.1-01 on a new drive (actually 2 drives with software RAID-1) and have the system up and running. I also have the original root partition drive installed in the system but it will not mount. I have tried e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdc1 with alternate block addresses (16384, 32768) and all copies of the superblock appear to be gone (corrupt). I have also tried fdisk -l /dev/hdc1, tune2fs -l /dev/hdc1 and everything tells me that partition information no longer exists.

I have dungog backups of my data but the data on the disk is more current. Is there a way to reconstruct the superblock so I can access the data?

Thanks,
Jim

[jimgoode]

Hooray, I solved the problem!
 
I downloaded, and ran, R-Linux and ultimately R-Srudio from www.r-tt.com. R-tools Technology is a Canadian company that has developed tools designed to recover data from hard disk drives (as well as floppies, pen drives, yada yada yada).
 
The R- products run on a Windows platform and handle all the FAT16/32, NTFS4/5, and EXT2/3 partition formats plus more.
 
The primary disk in our SME server crashed and would no longer boot. The drive was totally unreadable on the Linux platform, even as a non-boot drive... it just would not mount. It was obviously not readable by the Windows 2000 platform, either. This server supports our email and acts as the domain controller and shared drive support for our Windows 2000 desktop clients.
 
I ran R-Linux, which is a free product, and was able to read and recover pretty much only Linux files. This product did not, however, recover any of the data in the Windows shared drives area and really did not recover all of the Linux portions.
 
I ran R-Studio Demo to see how well it would work. The demo version does not recover files over 64KB in size, but it showed me that the purchased product would probably recover most of our files. I have been able to recover almost all our data. The price for the R-Studio is $79.99. They also have a network version that supports recovery of clients over a network that is $179.99.
 
Jim