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I've been having superblock issues from ext2fsd on my dualbooted machine. I ran e2fsck to restore backed up superblocks with sudo e2fsck -y -b blocknumber device, booted, and everything was fine.

After booting back into windows and later back into linux again, I was getting the same superblocks errors. After discovering ext2fsd was the problem, I uninstalled it from windows and ran sudo e2fsck -y -b blocknumber device again for all 3 corrupted partitions.

This time, however, I didn't get the long stream of numbers when running e2fsck on my /home partition, and afterwards, the system would time out on boot before sending me back into recovery mode.

After checking the logs, I found errors which led me to discovering my /home partition was now an ext2 filesystem and fixing /etc/fstab which had an incorrect uuid and filesystem for my /home partition according to blkid.

I rebooted and the GNOME splash and login came up just fine, but wouldnt let me login. Switching to tty3, I logged in, cd'd to home and ls'd, and all I found was a lost+found folder, and my home partition is still ext4.

If I can get my home partition back it working order, that'd be amazing, but at the bare minimum I need to recover its data, as there is a few years of family photos without backups I had moved on there temporarily...

SiriusCrack
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  • “a few years of family photos without backups” Why without backups? o.O – Andrea Lazzarotto May 29 '17 at 20:17
  • Right? This is all part of a huge reordering of drives and partitions to move from windows on a sdd/hdd config and linux tucked in the corner of a hdd to linux on the ssd/hdd and windows tucked away, all while preserving all the data. I'd just managed to get the two set up like yesterday, but I'd been using my newly-created Linux partition as the stable storage place for everything in the meantime, and was planning to make the backups just before the superblocks corruption. Silly me, right? – SiriusCrack May 29 '17 at 20:24
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    I see, but I would never let Windows touch any EXT drive, honestly. Have you tried scanning with Testdisk? – Andrea Lazzarotto May 29 '17 at 20:25
  • Haaaaaaaa... I know that now at least! I ran Testdrive way back in the beginning when I didn't know superblocks was the issue. But would that fix the switched-filesystem problem I have now? – SiriusCrack May 29 '17 at 20:30
  • Testdisk (I dunno if yours is a typo or you are referring to a different program) can restore a working partition table if the file system is OK. It can also help you see the contents of a partition if the damage is not severe. – Andrea Lazzarotto May 29 '17 at 20:35
  • Yeah typo. Where would I run testdisk from? recovery mode? Like tty2 or something? – SiriusCrack May 29 '17 at 20:40
  • Gosh, no please... don't run any OS on that drive for now. Use a live DVD or USB. :) – Andrea Lazzarotto May 29 '17 at 20:44
  • Thanks, yeah that's probably best. My USB magically has bad blocks now for some reason, so I'm making a new liveUSB and running testdisk and I'll get back to you! – SiriusCrack May 29 '17 at 20:51
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    See http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step – heynnema May 29 '17 at 20:52
  • I didn't see anything in that link that fits my issue, unless I'm mistaken? What I did was go to advanced tools and set the partition as ext4 and set it to make an image to another drive. It's a 2TB partition, so it'll probably take a bit, but that's what I meant waiting for now. Does anyone know if there's a chance that will work? – SiriusCrack May 30 '17 at 00:08
  • I can't create an image of the affected partition because it is a 2TB partition and my biggest spare drive is 1TB. How would I go abould using testdisk to use the superblock data to convert my corrupted, now ext2 partition back into ext4, or is the original superblock data replaced? Is what I'm trying to do the correct approach? – SiriusCrack May 30 '17 at 16:07
  • I think my problem is that testdisk is helping me find a deleted partition, while I'm looking to find one thats been shifted slightly or replaced by a similar partition? Or am I mistaken? Should I used tested to do a deep scan? Quick scan came up with nothing. – SiriusCrack May 30 '17 at 16:13
  • Yes, you should try a deep scan with Testdisk and R-Studio. But you should also get a new drive to image the one you are trying to recover. Also, if you are trying to restore pictures only you'd probably get most of them using Photorec (with no file names!). – Andrea Lazzarotto May 30 '17 at 23:26

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