My Switch Between EXT3 and REISERFS AND EXT3 AND

This is a post about the recent FileSsytem crash I had, and to give advices to future linux users if the question of which file system to choose. I'm no kernel-FS hackers, but as a user, I have used pretty much all major distros for the past 6 years (as my daily machine) including source-based gentoo.

I have about 3-4 hundred gigs of space 70% used in my newly purchased Dell machine (not my old overclocked dual procs self-buttembled bleeding edge hardware). And seeing the Fedora Core 5 just came out, have to try it out (I still think RHAT being the biggest 800lb Gorrilla is still in better position than others when fighting the MSFT dinosaurs).

All the FileSystem (FS frm now on) are reiserfs 3 exceptboot, as I been using the reiserfs with noatime for past 2 years. It seems fast, and comparatively safe (XFS-JFS).

Well, after the FC5 installation, I was going through the usual getting-latest-kernel-compiling-modules-just-to-get-somethin-workin routine. The machine hanged...hard. Well no problem it seemed, seeing the hard drive was not being accessed, I promptly do a hard reset. Bad idea,. After that, the next boot, the kernel tells me one of my biggest logical reiserfs parbreastion name MP3, it's "superblock" is missing corrupted, and would not go any further. Well, okay, dun panick. Grab one of the live CD, take out the parbreastion in fstab and reboot. Once go in, reiserfsck the parbreastion tells me I need to reiserfsck --rebuild-sb.

Now at this point, I was just really peeed not just about the situation, but about the lack of professionism for reiserfs. The Error msg reiserfs team put in has the "give us $25 and we'll help you for 10 minutes" paragraph, as well as all the CREDITS. But it doesn't explain clearly what the user to do at this point, and what are the other options. If a user is Joe sixpack wno computer science background see this, he would've backup whatever the data left, and take out the rusty winxp cd for restall.

So I did the --rebuild-sb. Well it turns out it's a logical parbreastion within the extend one. And reiserfsck prompt you for lots question including block size. I know the answer, but why can't a great programmer who did this amazing (?!) fsck prog figure out the stupid block size for the parbreastion? I mean it's not hard....so at least scan the parbreastion and tell the user if he wants to select that.

After reiserfs --rebuild-sb, things sink even more, now the superblock is still bad, and I can't even access thedev-hdcx device. At this point I googled pretty much for a whole day, and learn as much as I can about reiserfs....it didn't help. So I ddrescue (it's a great tool, you'd love it more than your gf when hdd crashes.) the whole 100gig parbreastion to a image file. And then I mount it with losetup as a loop drive, and try reiserfsck --rebuild-tree on it. Still wouldn't work, Device doesn't exist. Well, then try zeroing out the parbreastion table and recreate it. wdd if=-dev-zero . Now reiserfsck prompts me about superblock again. I tried --rebuild-sb again, --rebuild-tree. No luck....the parbreastion there, but I cannot touch it.

Couple of important things I realized, 1) reiserfs (version 3) IS NOT ATOMIC. What it means is it journal the metadata portion, metadata is atomic, but not the data. So there is still potential corruption when there are power outage or user-stupidity. Daniel Robbin has some articles at ibm.com discussing the FS type , yes the EXT3 could be slower, but it's journalling is for data. 2) reiserfs has no tools to work with when it comes to recovery or even just regular maintainance. reiserfsck ,......that it! Most of the other great little tools out there either needs you to recompile the apps wreiserfs support, or just flat out dun support it. And do you know if you google "recover reiserfs parbreastion", what u gonna get? A commercial tools call "Kernel ReiserFS - Data Recovery Software", and they charge $429 a license. My data is important to me, and I think programmers deserved to be paid. But the company seems detached from reality for charging 400+ for a recover software when there are data recovery cmopany charge pretty much the same amount for recovery work. If I'm at the mid to low end of spectrum, I wouldn't pay 400+ for this software, 100-200 max, and if I'm at the high end, I'll pay abit more and just ship it to the recovery company to retrive all data. These guys don't have a clue about pricing. Anyway, I downloaded the demo, and as promise all my data is there. it's just the superblock and the metadata are messed up. I googled another 50 times for advices-tools, and I learned alot about system recovery, parbreastion tools,image files etc.etc. But none if them works in this situation. And I'm not paying $500 for that software or a recovery job. I tried testdisk from CGSecurity, but no luck. But they have another little tool PhotoRec. Don't let the name fool you, it does alot more then Photo. It actually try and read every single block and match the underlying pattern against it's predefined file header list. It does not retain the file name, and you do get some false positive, because it's so thorough. I ran it, got most of my media files back, but in f1234.mp3 format. No matter, this is a lesson learned , and for a price of having messed up file names. I'll gladlly pay it. Once photorec's done retreiving my files, I rebooted back to my linux box, another reiserfs superblock corrupted message popup during fsck and wouldn't. I didn't snap, calmly I boot it in windows, open up YAReG (the tool that let you read reiserfs from windows), copy all the stuff to another FAT32 parbreastion. Boot a livecd, fdisk delete the parbreastion. Then I backup all the important data, and delete all the reiserfs parbreastion and reinstall the OS as EXT3. I will never use or recommand reiserfs to another soul. And unless reiserfs4 is IN THE KERNEL TREE. And all the ppl up there with Torvald approves it, I will not use it. And not that I didn't want to pay $25 to Reiser & Co. But I just cannot wait, and having a corrupted FS and a donation msg AT THE SAME TIME feels like KIDNAPPING to me.