Search and repair a broken ext4 superblock in CentOS

sudo fdisk -l

The above will list all the partitions on all the drives in your computer. To recover a lost partition, your going to need Testdisk. Testdisk is included in Parted Magic, and there’s a great guide on their site. For this though, we just need the partition number, such as /dev/sda3 or /dev/hdb1.

Now, make sure your superblock is the problem, by starting a filesystem check, replacing sdX with your partition name. Here, you can change ext4 to ext3, or ext2 to suit the filesystem.

sudo fsck.ext4 -v /dev/sdX

If your superblock is corrupt, the output will look like this

fsck /dev/sdb1
 fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
 e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
 fsck.ext4: Group descriptors look bad... trying backup blocks...
 fsck.ext4: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb1

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext4
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an 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>

Now lets find where your superblock backups are kept.

sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdX

Down at the bottom of this output, should be a list of the backups

Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Your almost there. Finally, restore the superblock from the backup, again replacing the x’s with your partition name, and block_number with the first backup superblock.

Now reboot, and your superblock should be fixed. If it’s not, repeat the steps, but restore a different backup superblock :)