Re: [gentoo-user] What's the value-added of journaling filesystems like ext4?

That's ok, I've never seen lost and found actually have anything in it before and wondered.  I'd still try running it again at least on your' home partition to see if it recovers anything.  FYI, repeated fsck (or whatever a given OS/filesystem calls it) is common, it applies to windows and mac os, though with macos it will claim a "0" exit code but you need to run it if any step (I.e. "checking extents overflow file") is done more than once, even though the disk utility says a partition looks to be fine.

-- “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”



Nov 4, 2019, 14:46 by n952162@×××.de:
Ah, I didn't know that about running fsck multiple times - I remember after doing my home directory - the more important one - it did say "file system modified".  I don't remember if the root fsck said that, though.  But it looks like I'm going to have re-install gentoo, in any case, because virtualbox is all sitting in lost+found.


On 11/04/19 21:53, mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com wrote:
You need to run fsck repeatedly until it doesn't report any errors or *******file system modified******** messages before mounting!  you need to run it on all partitions.  Some errors hide under other errors but will show up on the next run.  It's not unusual to have to run fsck 2-3 times, I've had errors on the first 4 runs and had to run a 5th before it was clean (only once in 10+ years).  Don't forget root, you'll have to boot off another partition or external (i.e. thumb drive/optical) in order to properly clean root.  It's best to have a second copy of the O.S. on another partition for these cases, and as backup in case you mung the root directory/OS somehow.  Hopefully you haven't done permanent damage by mounting volumes that were not completely fixed, if you changed anything (or ran a program that does, like firefox etc.) you may have some permanent file loss or have to use a recovery tool to get back what's lost, after running fsck until it thinks the drive is fine.

-- “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”



Nov 4, 2019, 13:40 by n952162@×××.de:
trying to restore ... virtualbox won't come up (I was in virtualbox when
my window manager lost mouse coordination and I hat to "reboot").

I see that many of the files in /lost+found have virtualbox strings in
them.  Anybody have an idea how to get them back to their proper places?


On 11/04/19 20:47, n952162 wrote:
I had a power-loss situation and when the system came up I went into the
grub rescue screen - my root file system was trashed.  I fsck-ed that
and had a ton of prompts until I did the "all" answer.  I guess it can
happen, every once in a while - even with a journaling filesystem - I
guess.

I was able to bring up the system but then discovered that my home
filesystem was also trashed, hundreds of files in lost+found and many
gone forever.

Both filesystems ext4.

What gives?  Should I have quick  gone out and bought a lottery ticket,
or is journalling just hype?