In the Disks utility, it still showed up as having partitions, looking like it was just not mounted; and the options to check the filesystem, repair it, etc. were available. But something tipped me off that it was messed up (I forget what now, sorry), so rather than trying to mount or repair it, I ran fsck, and got this result:
Code: Select all
thisuser@thiscomputer:~$ sudo fsck /dev/sdb1
[sudo] password for thisuser:
fsck from util-linux 2.31.1
e2fsck 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
fsck.ext2: Input/output error while trying to open /dev/sdb1
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a valid ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
or
e2fsck -b 32768 <device>
I am not sure if this drive is ext2/ext3/ext4 or not. I've only ever used it with Linux, so it probably is, but I'm not sure.
Following similar questions on these forums and elsewhere on the net, I ran
dmesg | grep sdb
. The results are very long, so here is a pastebin link: https://pastebin.com/XpQ6x18Z Lots of mention of I/O errors on sectors 2048, 76040, and 3907028864, but apparently some other ones as well. Does that mean the drive is just plain bad? Is it going to be impossible to rescue data from it? However, there are also a lot of mentions of
EXT4-fs
in there. So maybe this drive is indeed an ext4 one? Or are those just errors saying that it's not actually ext4? I don't understand how to read dmesg output. Again following other, similar threads on these forums, I tried to run gparted. Before opening, it gave me a whole bunch of errors, along the lines of
Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb: Input/output error
and Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb
. I clicked "ignore" a bunch of times. Gparted finally gave me information on the drive, at least, showing the drive's fstab instructions, "mount as" instructions, etc. (I suppose I should've got a screengrab of this, but I didn't think to.) Nothing that seemed to obviously indicate a way to fix it, or to indicate if the drive is ext2/3/4 or not.After I did that, Disks no longer even showed Format Partition, etc. as options for the drive. The only available option in Disks is currently Edit Mount Options.
All that, and I'm still not even sure if I can/should run
e2fsck -b 8193 <device> or e2fsck -b 32768
. What should I do next? I would still like to save the data from this drive if at all possible, and to keep using the drive. Thanks in advance for any help!