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Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 01:17:33 +0100
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com>
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Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: disk recovery problem(s)
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On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:48:41 -0500, Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com> wrote:
> 
> 	Had a power outage recently; when trying to fsck several
> external hard drives I'm getting unexpected errors.
> 	For example:
> 
> huff@>> fsck /dev/da3a
> ** /dev/da3a
> ** Last Mounted on /backup
> ** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
> ** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
> ROOT INODE UNALLOCATED
> ALLOCATE? [yn] 
> 
> 	a) what's probably happened?
> 	b) is there a way to recover the data?  I can scrub the disk
> and restore, but would like to avoid that if at all possible.

I really hope you don't get into the trouble that I have (allthough
you mentioned that you've got backups)...

Your fsck output seems to indicate that fsck can handle the damage.
You could now let it continue. If a parent inode has disappeared,
its child inodes (orphaned ones) - or, to be correct, the files or
directories they represent - get restored in the lost+found/ directory
where their name (probably lost) gets replaced by the inode number.
If it's a directory, it content will usually be present with the
file names, only the topmost part of a hierarchy will be affected.




-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...