[arch-general] Mounted ext4 filesystem without journal

[Maksim Fomin]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, 4 February 2021 г., 18:40, Alexander Kapshuk via arch-general <arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:

> 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.

Judging by absense of init and only 'lost+found' folder it seems that your root partition is totally damaged. It is unclear from your report whether it was damaged before fsck or during this operation. Anyway, you can try any data restore utility or ext4 tools to try to repair the data. As others already suggested, you should also test your disk with smarttools (probably RAM also).

P.S. Your case is somewhat strange. Basically you have some unknown issue with root fs and agreed to fsck it. After reboot your root fs looks fine, but all data is gone - this does not look like typical fs corruption where fs metadata is damaged and partition cannot be mounted (and it does contain some 'artefacts' or garbage data).