Journal superblock is corrupt

Question

Recently, when I booted my ubuntu partition, I recieved an Initramfs error. I followed the directions in this post:

Initramfs error during boot

However, when I ran the command:

sudo fsck /dev/sdb1

(As a side note, my ubuntu partition is on sdb) I recieved another error saying:

ext2fs_check_desc: Corrupt group descriptor: bad block for block bitmap
fsck.ext4: Group descriptors look bad... trying backup blocks...
Journal superblock has an unknown incompatible feature flag set.
Abort <y>?

I type no and the next thing says:

Journal superblock is corrupt
Fix<y>?

Next comes a series of y to fix this issue.

My question is this, is there a better method to fix a corrupt superblock? Or does this mean I need to reinstall ubuntu 14.04?

Answer 1

Let me offer you a solution I found:

1. Reboot from a live CD

2. Find out which partition we are dealing with"

   sudo fdisk -l
   # but in your case its sdd1
   

3. Make sure its a superblock problem with:

   sudo fsck.ext4 -v /dev/xxx # in your case xxx => sdb
   

4. Check for your super block backups location:

   sudo mke2fs -n /dev/xxx
   
   # Results:
   Superblock backups stored on blocks:
   32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208
   

5. Restore superblock from backup with and repeat till its fixed:

   sudo e2fsck -b block_number /dev/xxx
   

6. If step 4 does not work repeat with next value in step 3

Source:

https://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/

https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1245536.html