Re: [LUG] Corrupt partitions

["mltruscott" <lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

thanks for your suggestions, I am going to try scanning with a different
antivirus to see what that throws up. Then I will try the rescue disk
(again) and then I'm not sure what.  I've just got SUSE 8.2 (only £9.99 from
PC World) which would be good to put in the unreachable partition, but at
the moment that doesn't want to recognise that it is there.  There is no
data in the partition that I want and don't have a copy of.

As I say my Linux knowledge is pretty poor at the moment, but I hope to do
something about that.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon Waters" <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <list@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: [LUG] Corrupt partitions


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> mltruscott wrote:
> >
> > I was running Mandrake 9.0 as part of a dual boot system.  Then my sons
> > installed a new game (in Windows) and since then Linux is unreachable.
> >
> > I get the following error message while booting:
> >
> > EXT3-fs:unable to read superblock
> > mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags kernel panic.  No init found.  Try
> > passing in it= option to kernel.
>
> I think a virus got your MBR (Lots do including Magistr viruses), so
> disinfect Windows first, then booting with Knoppix or recovery disk
> should let you see if the Linux filesystems are okay, and rerun "lilo"
> (possibly with have to specify a patch to the old lilo.conf (or whatever
> tool mandrake uses - grub?).
>
> IF the Linux filesystem is corrupted, by something overwriting the start
> of a partition, this would cause the first superbock to be corrupt.
>
> However superblocks are places at regular intervals across McCusick, and
> derived filesystems, and a later superblock can be fed to fsck (or
> e2fsck more specifically), to allow it to repair the filesystem. Yes
> might have iffy undelete for files, but it inherited Unixes get out of
> jail free card, if you toast an entire filesystem.
>
> Obviously if the disk is so corrupted as to require use of redundant
> superblock you might not want to rely on it's contents, but I've used
> this to recover data from damaged filesystems before on HP-UX, but then
> I have always recreated the filesystem from scratch.
>
> If it is the partition table that is corrupt I'm not sure what the right
> recovery plan is for Linux, my guess would be check parted
> documentation, I'm sure there will be a tool.
>
>  Simon
>
> PS: The magistr virus does it after so many boots or something similar,
> so your son may not have installed the virus, just been a victim of it's
> timing, although I'd be very suspicious of the games executables.
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