Re: [Dump-users] dump data from a corrupted ext3 volume

[Tony N. <ton...@ge...>]

At 12:23 PM -0500 1/10/07, Dragan Krnic wrote:

>I am trying to salvage data from an unlucky volume.
>The dump utility starts with following messages:
>
>DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed Jan 10 18:07:37 2007
>DUMP: Dumping /dev/sdl (/disc) to standard output
>DUMP: Excluding inode 7 (resize inode) from dump
>DUMP: Label: none
>DUMP: Writing 64 Kilobyte records
>DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
>
>and then after about two and a half minutes it says
>
>/dev/sdl: Can't read next inode while scanning inode #2342912
>
>The volume was quite big, 3.5 TB, but it was only about 1.2 TB
>full. The dump utility apparently finds more than 2 million
>inodes but unfortunately it breaks with the above message
>before actually dumping any data.
>
>Is there some version of dump which would ignore such errors
>and just try to make sense out of the remaining sound data,
>even if there are corrupted chunks in between?
>
>Do you have some other suggestion, how to salvage as much
>data as possible (e2fsck has even less patience with it)?

Off the top of my head, you might start by patching dump's traverse.c
mapfiles() so that instead of exiting it tries to continue, as it does for
a EXT2_ET_BAD_BLOCK_IN_INODE_TABLE error.  Dump may barf in other places as
well, and you'd need to deal with them as they arise.
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:ton...@ge...>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>