EXT3 broke down - system broken - help?!

kmh · n00b Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 54

Hey, I have a huge problem with my computer: Just booted into Gentoo and got an error message concerning my filesystem.
The whole problem began when I last turned of the computer and constantly received an error message regarding alsasound (ERROR: alsasound caught an interrupt) - which stalled the shutdown-process and I was forced to manually turn off the computer in the end.

Anyway, here is the relevant output in /var/log/message from the next time I booted the computer:

EXT3-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem
EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.

kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds.
EXT3-fs: recovery complete
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.

Then I panicked as / was still only in readonly and run e2fsck -y on it.
Now, my whole system seems ruined. A couple of files have been replaced by directories, inti which random content from elsewhere has been copied, e.g. my /etc/ld.so.conf is not a directory containing some java ebuilds etc.

Is there _any_ way to fix this, or do I basically have to format and start all over again?

My second problem is my encrypted partition, which I can no longer seem to be able to access, what should I do about that, not touch it until I have the other partition cleared and reinstalled? Or would that probably need fixing, too? (It's an EXT3 system with aes-256 encryption, however, as fstab is also on the list of files that disappeared, I am no longer 100% about this ..).

Any help whatsoever would be greatly appreciated!

kmh · n00b Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 54

Just realised that there isn't a lot of extra information in this post, but have no idea what could be useful, so if there is anything else you would want to know, please let me know, and I'll see if I can find it.

BTW, apologies for the lack of formatting, doing this from links as X is also affected by my problem

kmh · n00b Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 54

OK, rebooted into windows now. Coming to think of it my "e2fsck /dev/hda5" was probably very stupid. And I've kind of given up on getting that one back alive again, but not too bothered as it is only the root partition and software. All my interesting files and data are in /dev/hda6.

Is there any possibility I can access that drive from windows for recovery / putting everything onto a DVD before throwing the laptop out of the window? It is an encrypted partition and I'm pretty sure it is ext3 (or ext2, but not very likely).

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 8:58 pm Post subject:

Yes there are drivers for windows to access ext2 and ext3. I use them too, http://www.fs-driver.org/

I would also recommend to make backups.

kmh · n00b Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 54

Thanks. Those can't handle the encryption, though, can they? That's kind of my main problem at this stage. Having a look at it now.

Have some backups of the vital stuff, but not of everything (eg. music collection, photo albums and things like that, which I would quite like back and probably should have backup'd, too.. oh, well

)

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:08 pm Post subject:

Sorry, I don*t think they can handle it. But you can access your drive from windows and repair or access the files. You should have asked before. I*m so sorry.

kmh · n00b Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 54

No worries. I have rebooted into linux now and tried losetup -e AES256 /dev/loop2 /dev/hda6 - entered the right password, but cannot go on to mount /dev/loop2 .. is there any way I could check what kind of filesystem this might be, or alternatively, if by any chance I had used a different encryption for the partition (I'm almost sure it was AES, but apparently the computer disagrees??