Linux Community Magazine

Open SUSE is an operating system that is built on the top of Linux Kernel. It is available as OpenSUSE 10.x and 11.x series. This operating system includes an installation and administration utility called YaST2, which is a powerful installation and system management tool. But at times, you observe that while updating your operating system using Yast2, it fails with unexpected errors. The file system might get corrupt due to the occurrence of such errors. In such situations, you need to format the hard drive and restore data from an updated and valid data backup. But, if you face any issues while restoring lost data from the backup or it is not up-to-date or non-existent, Data Recovery Linux applications can be used to extract the lost or inaccessible data.

Consider a practical scenario, you try to update your operating system openSUSE10.3 to 11.0 and it fails due to connection failure. After this, when you boot your system, it crashes and the boot process fails. The original desktop environment remains the same but boot menu displays openSUSE 11.0. Additionally, when you run a disk check utility, you get file system errors like:

unreadable or no valid ext2 data

Cause

The above issue occurs if these conditions are true:

Due to connection failure, there has been partial installation of openSUSE 11.0

One or more file system metadata structures (generally Superblock) are corrupted or damaged

Superblock is the key data structure that holds file system information as file system type, location of data packets, file system size etc.

Solution

To solve this issue, you need to follow these steps:Run fsck using a boot disk. It is the command-line tool that allows you to solve most of the file system corruption issues. If superblock corruption is the issue, you need to replace it with alternate SuperblockFormat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system, if you continue to encounter the same issue. The lost data can be restored from backup.

If you find that data backup is invalid and is not able to restore the required information or is absent, Linux Data Recovery tools can be used. Such software use powerful scanning algorithms to recover the lost data in a safe manner. With self-explanatory user interface, advanced recovery features and read-only design, these Data Recovery Linux applications work as effective data recovery tools.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a powerful Linux Data Recovery application to recover the lost or deleted data. The software comes with advanced features like RAW File Recovery, Disk Imaging, File Filter etc. It supports Ext2, Ext3 and Reiser FS file systems. The tool is compatible with almost all Linux distributions like SUSE, Red Hat, SlackWare, Turbo Linux, Gentoo etc.