[svlug] hard drive errors and now lost files with ext3fs

[Andrew Morton]

Daevid Vincent wrote:
> 
> i came home today to see that my (fairly stock) RH7.2 box was only
> responding to pings and nothing else.
> 
> i rebooted and it made me fsck manually. i typed 'y' to all the prompts for
> whacky inodes and stuff.
> 

If e2fsck did that, then the filesystem is probably being mounted
as ext2, not ext3.  For ext3 it will just recover the journal, no
fuss.  Check the filesystem types in /proc/mounts - sometimes /etc/mtab
tells lies about the root filesystem type.

If it _is_ being mounted as ext2 then probably it's time to futz
with your initrd setup, or just compile a kernel with ext3
statically linked.