Bad magic number during fsck

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 09:39 -0500, Smugzilla wrote:
> Something really strange happened to my FC3 server running ext3 a few
> days ago. It logged a "journal commit I/O error" and things started
> getting screwy. The system isn't frozen, but my man pages are gone and I
> can't get "ls" to show me anything. I tried running fsck last night and
> got the following response:
> 
> [root at bender ~]# fsck
> fsck 1.36 (05-Feb-2005)
> e2fsck 1.36 (05-Feb-2005)
> /: recovering journal
> fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to re-open /
> e2fsck: io manager magic bad!
> 
> Then this morning, while typing up this message I tried fsck again and
> got:
> 

NEVER run fsck on a running/mounted filesystem.  It can and often does
cause corruption of the filesystem.

To run fsck use the install or rescue CD and boot to rescue mode then
run fsck on the partitions when they are NOT mounted.

Assuming that root ( / ) is on /dev/hda2 the command would be
"e2fsck /dev/hda2"

> [root at bender ~]# fsck
> fsck 1.36 (05-Feb-2005)
> fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve 'LABEL=/'
> 
> I'm in way over my head here. Is there any way for me to fix my file
> system, either using fsck or with Knoppix, or should I just backup as
> much data as I can and reinstall the OS? And just as important, does
> anyone know how this might have happened in the first place?
> 
> By the way, "ls" doesn't work for root, but it does work for other
> users.
> 
> Thanks,
> Pete S.
>