Hi- I have a system in front of me with Ubuntu 9.04 on it- it was installed ext3. the part that is escapingmy understanding is recovering from a file corruption of some sort. Duplicate or bad blocks is the error message. The automatic run- in recovery mode- of fsck dies with exit status 4.
A manual run of fsck shows a list of what it calls multiply-claimed blocks in several inodes. and there's aprompt asking yor no about cloning them.
Needless to say- I am quite aware that my lack of understanding risks avoidable data loss. Any suggestions both on what to do and the best training document/s so I can understand why/how this issue happened in the first place will be appreciated. This is one of those gaps in my understanding of Linux admin skills. Either this is so drop dead simple that I will feel more of an idiot for not having "known" what is going on..Or it's going to be non-trivial to recover from.
My first suggested fix was using Puppy etc and an external drive to simply grab any unique personal files that are intact- then DBAN wipe that drive before starting over. Which is what I cal a "Last Resort First" tactic . I hate having to use them, but LRF type methods have become a major mental hygiene tool for me :)
Of course- I am deeply curious if my oft preached model for data protection- keeping the OS and Userdata on physically separate drives would have helped here -or not..