In early 2005 the drive containing the OS (3.6 -release) in my backup
server started throwing random faults and the system became unusable.
The laptop that the server was backing up had it's hard drive fry
itself two days prior and the replacement hadn't shown up yet. I used
a Knoppix live cd on the server to get an OS up and running to
diagnose the problem, and it somehow "touched" the backup drive and
altered the superblock and corrupted the magic numbers along with all
the backups that I know of. My attempts to copy the secondary magic
number to the primary were unsuccessful, as well as all the tertiary,
etc. Unfortunately, as far as fixing the problem goes, I shipped off
to the Army shortly thereafter and have been on a roller coaster ride
ever since.
I'm still overseas and in an environment where I don't always have
free and easy access to the Internet. However, for a network setup
for local use I have a new machine that will run -release 4.6 and the
old backup drive is being shipped here so that I can work on it. I've
read what I can find in the man pages and from Google - I know that
backup magic numbers are stored in several places on a partition, but
none of them are present. I know that 3.6 is an old release, but I've
gone nearly 5 years without my life's accumulated data and I would
like to at least give it a try. Since the partition used the whole
drive, is it possible to manually calculate the magic number based on
the geometry of the drive?
Jay C.
