Re: [arch-general] Mounted ext4 filesystem without journal

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 8:45 PM Uwe Sauter via arch-general wrote:

There is a tool called testdisk (https://www.cgsecurity.org) that will scan all blocks of your disk and try to interprete whatever leftovers of the filesystem it finds. It might be able to recover some parts but you will need a second disk as recovery target.

Good luck.

Thanks for your feedback. I'll give it a go.

Am 07.02.21 um 18:39 schrieb Alexander Kapshuk via arch-general:

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I haven't had any replies to the email below so far. Not sure if that's because that email didn't make it through to the mailing list, even though it does show up here https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-February/048597.html, or if it's because the problem I'm asking help for is unique and the members of the list have nothing to suggest.

Thought I'd resend the original email just in case. Any pointers would be appreciated.

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Alexander Kapshuk Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 5:40 PM Subject: Mounted ext4 filesystem without journal To: General Discussion about Arch Linux

Most probably due to a buggy custom kernel, fsck on /dev/sda2, i.e the root partition, failed with a rootfs prompt and an invitation to run fsck on /dev/sda2 presented. On having done that and rebooted, when performing fsck on /dev/sda2, the system reported that: /dev/sda2 had not been cleanly unmounted 0.4% non-contiguous blocks mounting /dev/sda2 on real root EXT4-fs (sda2) mounted filesystem without journal Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist.

The wiki article on fsck troubleshooting, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fsck#Troubleshooting, suggests using tune2fs to write a new journal to /dev/sda2. But it doesn't seem to be available when in rootfs.

Booting into the Arch Linux installation CD and mounting /dev/sda2 over /mnt reveals lost+found as the sole contents of the directory. As an experiment, mounting /dev/sda1 over /mnt confirms the presence of all the files there are on my boot partition.

Any pointers on how to proceed with this would be much appreciated.