[Tfug] Mount and Filesize Issues

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 10:09:34PM -0400, Charles R. Kiss wrote:
>
> Now about that backup drive.  Yes it mounts. I have some directories and
> some files in the lost+found that are renamed with six or seven digit  
> numbers
> preceded by the hash mark (#).

Those are inode numbers.  Simply, when an ext2/ext3 filesystem becomes fouled
up in some manner, inodes can become lost; allocated but no longer attached to
a filename.  When e2fsck scans the drive and finds these lost inodes, it gives
them the only name it can (the inode number) and puts them in lost+found.  Now
it's your job to sort complete garbage from useful data, then determine which
of those are actually complete files or still useful in some way, and then
finally rename them and move them elsewhere.

> I guess when formatting it
> originally, I did so sub-optimally.  I basically kept the original
> partitions because there were some poopietary information on /dev/sdc1,
> so I formatted /dev/sdc3 since that was the big partition.
>
> But maybe I did format them all, as it says, but I don't think so.
>
> I'm almost 100% positive I formatted sdc3  ext3, but now it reads it ext2 
> after running
> e2fsck... uh oh.

Sub-optimal, yes, but you're not missing much space and this shouldn't be the
source of your problems.

The reason some tools see the partition as ext2 is because ext3 is backward
compatible with ext2 and in most cases looks almost identical.  As long as you
either cleanly unmount an ext3 filesystem or run e2fsck over a broken ext3
filesystem to fix it, you can mount it as either one.  Basically, you just
need to make sure that the ext3 journal has been flushed.  After that, you can
start calling it ext2 again if you want.

If you want to make sure it uses ext3, you can certainly specify that when
mounting.  If you're mounting in some other manner, like from a USB enclosure
where gnome-mount handles it... well, I'm not entirely sure how you would
force the issue there.


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