Topic: "The superblock could not be read..."

[weblance]

Hi

I'm getting an error during boot:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

What on earth should i do?

/Carl

[Stefano]

first of all you should give more details..

[weblance]

Which details do you need?

The problem is that i'm not physically at the server location, it's located 400 km from where i am. I probably have to catch a plane tomorrow morning to get to the server

It's an IBM server, about 4 yrs old, don't remember the model. It has 4 HDD's running SME 7.5.1 i SME RAID 5. It is a standard SME installation, and the server is only used as a fileserver.

I DON'T HAVE A BACKUP 

[Stefano]

Which details do you need?
It's an IBM server, about 4 yrs old, don't remember the model. It has 4 HDD's running SME 7.5.1 i SME RAID 5. It is a standard SME installation, and the server is only used as a fileserver.

hw or sw raid? raid5 with hotspare?

I DON'T HAVE A BACKUP 

well.. I guess it's time to think about it, isn't it?

[weblance]

sw raid5 without hotspare - sme handles this

and you are quite right about the backup !

[weblance]

I have a man on site and he tried

e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/mapper/main-root

It resultet in a lot of messages that he had to answer yes to. At last he panict and rebooted the server. No he has a kernel panic...

Is there any possibility to recover the data on the discs?

[Stefano]

I have a man on site and he tried

e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/mapper/main-root

It resultet in a lot of messages that he had to answer yes to. At last he panict and rebooted the server. No he has a kernel panic...

...
maybe raid isn't starting properly

Is there any possibility to recover the data on the discs?

maybe.. but:
- keep your man on site at least at 10 m from the server
- try booting with SME's cd in rescue mode
- come back here and be verbose

[weblance]

I'm flying in tomorrow. Going to try booting in rescue mode.

Thanks for the help so far.

/Carl

[weblance]

Hi,

i'm at the server now. Trying to boot it up it says:

sde: Spinning up disk..........

And eventually it ends up in a kernel panic.

[Stefano]

ok..

is there any external disk (usb) connected?

did you try to boot with SME's cd?

try to identify sde disk, disconnect it and try again

[weblance]

There is no external usb disk connected.

I've tried sme rescue and i get the message:

You don't have any Linux partitions. Press return to get a shell. The system will reboot automatically when you exit from the shell. 

Working on identifying sde disk...