Ext2 Group Descriptors (Re: corrupt block makes file system repair impossible?)

Benjamin C R LaHaise (blah@dot.superaje.com)
Wed, 9 Jul 1997 17:57:20 +0000 ( )

On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Thomas Koenig wrote:
[snip]
> Is this true? What's the point in having multiple superblocks if
> trashing a single sector can still completely wreck your file system?

This is a big problem with ext2 in my opinion - I've trashed filesystems
on my SCSI drive several times while running with an IDE drive (probably
stack overwrites/cruddy ide controller). In 99% of cases I believe the
group descriptors are useless on disk - a piece of information that can
be corrupted, yet e2fsck doesn't give an option to 'fix' it. What
approach can we take to fix this?

-ben