Restoring a Bad Superblock

When the superblock of a file system becomes damaged, you must restore it. fsck tells you when a superblock is bad. Fortunately, redundant copies of the superblock are stored within a file system. You can use fsck -o b to replace the superblock with one of the copies.

How to Restore a Bad Superblock

1. Become superuser.

2. Change to a directory outside the damaged file system.

3. Unmount the file system.

   # umount mount-point

   ---

   Caution -

   Be sure to use the -N option with newfs in the next step. If you omit the -N option, you will create a new, empty file system.

   ---

4. Display the superblock values with the newfs -N command.

   # newfs -N /dev/rdsk/device-name

   The output of this command displays the block numbers that were used for the superblock copies when newfs created the file system.

5. Provide an alternative superblock with the fsck command.

   # fsck -F ufs -o b=block-number /dev/rdsk/device-name

   fsck uses the alternative superblock you specify to restore the primary superblock. You can always try 32 as an alternative block, or use any of the alternative blocks shown by newfs -N.

Example--Restoring a Bad Superblock

The following example restores the superblock copy 5264 for the /files7 file system:

# cd /
# umount /files7
# newfs -N /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7
/dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7: 163944 sectors in 506 cylinders of 9 tracks, 36 sectors
 83.9MB in 32 cyl groups (16 c/g, 2.65MB/g, 1216 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32, 5264, 10496, 15728, 20960, 26192, 31424, 36656, 41888,
 47120, 52352, 57584, 62816, 68048, 73280, 78512, 82976, 88208,
 93440, 98672, 103904, 109136, 114368, 119600, 124832, 130064, 135296,
 140528, 145760, 150992, 156224, 161456,
# fsck -F ufs -o b=5264 /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7
Alternate superblock location: 5264.
** /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7
** Last Mounted on
** Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
** Phase 3 - Check Connectivity
** Phase 4 - Check Reference Counts
** Phase 5 - Check Cyl groups
36 files, 867 used, 75712 free (16 frags, 9462 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
/dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s7 FILE SYSTEM STATE SET TO OKAY
 
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
# 

If the superblock in the root (/) file system becomes damaged and you cannot boot the system, reinstall /kernel/unix and rebuild the root (/) file system with newfs. Because a superblock is created by the newfs command, you do not need to restore it.

How to Fix a UFS File System fsck Cannot Repair

Sometimes you need to run fsck a few times to fix a file system because problems corrected on one pass may uncover other problems not found in earlier passes. fsck does not keep running until it comes up clean, so you must rerun it manually.

Pay attention to the information displayed by fsck. It may help you fix the problem. For example, the messages may point to a bad directory. If you delete the directory, you may find that fsck runs cleanly.

If fsck still cannot repair the file system, you can try to use the fsdb, ff, clri, and ncheck commands to figure out and fix what is wrong. See fsdb(1M), ff(1M), clri(1M), and ncheck(1M) for information about how to use these commands. You may, ultimately, need to re-create the file system and restore its contents from backup media. See Chapter 35, Restoring Files and File Systems (Tasks) for information about restoring complete file systems.

If you cannot fully repair a file system but you can mount it read-only, try using cp, tar, or cpio to retrieve all or part of the data from the file system.

If hardware disk errors are causing the problem, you may need to reformat and divide the disk into slices again before re-creating and restoring file systems. Hardware errors usually display the same error again and again across different commands. The format command tries to work around bad blocks on the disk. If the disk is too severely damaged, however, the problems may persist, even after reformatting. See format(1M) for information about using the format command. See Chapter 23, SPARC: Adding a Disk (Tasks) or Chapter 24, x86: Adding a Disk (Tasks) for information about installing a new disk.