Linux Community Magazine

Are you finding difficulties in mounting your Linux system disk? The problem could be due to corruption in the file system. To address such issues, Linux OS provides fsck utility. It is a command-line utility, which checks integrity and consistency of the Linux file system. In addition, it finds errors and fixes them, if possible. However, if you run this utility on a mounted file system, then you may not be able to access the data at all. In such cases, you should use a third-party Linux data recovery software to perform data recovery Linux system.

Consider a scenario wherein you have accidentally run fsck on a mounted Linux OS. The inode root gets damaged and all inodes start calling similar blocks. When you try to mount the volume after fsck, the following error message is discovered:

"Mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so"

When you run dmesg, as suggested in the error message, another error message may be displayed, that is:

"ext3-fs: corrupt root inode, run e2fsck"

And when you run e2fsck, yet another error message is displayed, that is:

"Root inode is not a directory. Clear?"

Once you press 'Y' and proceed with the process, the parent entry of each inode from the root directory will be deleted. The root inode will attempt to recover but if it fails, another error message will be displayed, that is:

"Cannot Allocate Root Inode"

After this error message, you will not be able to access your system.

Cause:

This behavior is caused due to corruption of the file system, superblock, root inode, or any other Linux data structure. Because of this, the OS cannot locate the hard disk volumes.

Resolution:

To sort out this problem and perform Linux data recovery, you should reformat the hard disk and reinstall the Linux operating system. However, that would invariably mean that your valuable data will be lost. In such cases, you should use a third-party Linux recovery to Recover Linux lost data. Such tools are able to recover lost data safely by using fast yet sophisticated scanning algorithms.