Within disk setup the root and home partitions were set to be deleted and formatted(installers default choice), but I did a basic edit so that home was not to be formatted. The installer deleted home and then tried to recreate (I think), but when mount command was issued it failed with system error code -3003, with the error message that mount could not determine filesystem type. I proceeded with the installation and it completed with no further difficulty and the system is working well.
The problem is that mount cannot determine filesystem type. Before when I installed 11.1 from the Live CD it also set home to be deleted/formatted (again, did a basic edit so that home was not to be formatted), and mount executed successfully afterwards (that’s why I wasn’t alarmed when 11.3 also wanted to delete home, though know I know I should have entered expert partitioning setup and should have made sure home wasn’t going to be touched).
Is there a way to restore the home partition. I am prepared to simply format the partition and go on, but I’d like to know if it can be restored. I’m pretty sure it was an ext3 filesystem.
> Is there a way to restore the home partition. I am prepared to simply
> format the partition and go on, but I’d like to know if it can be
> restored. I’m pretty sure it was an ext3 filesystem.
Probably not. Do a “file -s /dev/whatever” to see if it is still detected as ext3. If it is, it
might be mountable. Otherwise, you can only use comercial tools to try recover some of the data
(kind of searching the whole partition for things that look like files of known formats), in the
hope that the format only replaced the metadata structures without really overwriting it all.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))
Okay, I tried out testdisk. It’s a great tool to have! Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to solve my problem. Using testdisk I was able to browse the home partition. Within the advanced menu there was the option to check for a superblock on an ext2/3 filesystem. I tried it, but testdisk couldn’t find any. I guess that was the reason why mount failed.
Anyway, since I could browse the partition it was decided that nothing was needed anyway. So I opened up the YaST Partitioner and formatted the partition with ext4. Then I follwed these instructions for moving home on root to another partition. So far everything seems to be fine and working well.
Afterwards I did some searching about missing superblocks, but the info I found dealt with a corrupted main superblock. Any advice given was to find a backup superblock and use it to repair the filesystem.
Thanks for all the advice given! Now I have testdisk at hand in case of something else going wrong…