Thank you for you recommendations.
I was able to restore some of the data which has been lost.
The nvidia graphics card was causing all the trouble, after a replacement with
intel graphics, I have never experienced any issues again.
It is likely that the closed source driver caused also other issues which
didn't always lead to crashes, but to an unreliable system where things got
corrupted silently.
But this is sure not an issue in tools (like fsck) which produce much
i/o load and thus have a greater probability to get hit by the buggy
nvidia driver, thus I can close the issue.
Since then I have always avoided buying equipment from firms which do
not provide open source drivers, and I have never experienced any issues
with data corruption any more.
So I call out to the world: If you are a hardware manufacturer and want
me to buy your product: Provide good open source drivers!
** Changed in: e2fsprogs (Ubuntu)
Status: New => Invalid
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1375640
Title:
fsck should do some sanity checks to avoid damaging an ext3/ext4 file
system
Status in e2fsprogs package in Ubuntu:
Invalid
Bug description:
After some crashes due to a broken nvidia driver, the system didn't boot and
presented me a shell to manually repair the file system.
Then I didn't think and typed fsck without the -t ext4 parameter and the
program asked me many questions, if I want to fix something which I answered
with y.
After some time I remembered, that I forgot to specify the -t ext4 parameter,
but the filesystem was broken already, so it was already too late, when I do
Ctrl-C.
And I didn't think about that there could be already severe file system
corruption, making the things even worse.
Thus I would recommend that a warning message is displayed, when calling fsck
manually with the wrong filesystem type.
Also a big note that this is now the right time to make an image backup of
the disk could be helpful for people like me that always tell other people how
important backups are before working on something, but sometimes fail to make
one, because they forget to turn their brain on before starting work. ;-)
I would expect that when calling fsck on a filesystem, not just defaults are
used, but the filesystem type is determined.
Then a big scary warning message should say something like this:
"
You have called fsck on an ext4 filesystem.
For an ext4 file system you *must* specify the filesystem type with option
"-t ext4", otherwise severe damage to the file system will occur.
NOTE: It is highly recommended that you make a backup image of your disk
device before you continue, so that you have something to recover from, if
things go wrong.
This can be especially important, if the disk drive hardware you are trying
to recover the filesystem on, is possibly dying.
You can use dd_rescue or similar tools to try to get a disk image to recover
as much as possible of your data from a damaged hard drive.
Are you really sure, you want to continue (and probably damage the file
system)? (yes/NO)
"
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