The following error message in Linux operating system may annoy you when you run the fsck command with the sudden fear of losing the precious data:
The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is xxx
The physical size of the device is xxx
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!
The superblock is the important data structure of Linux file systems which describes the size of the inode-table and the size of the total file system. This also contains the information like File system type, size, status, information about the metadata structures. Thus this shows that the loss of either information may create serious problems of data loss in Linux.
The problem could be if some files have been attempted to write upon the portion of the disk where the superblock is stored and the filesystem wouldn’t allow it to write. The solution of the problem runs in three steps:
1. Unmount all the partitions using the ‘unmount-a’ command in single user mode
2. Repair the partitions
3. Resize the partitions
Resizing the partitions without repairing them may complicate the problem with the following error message:
attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to resize
So this is advised to repair the partitions first using e2fsck -cc /dev/md3 command.
The process is safe if you have the backup copy of the data and if you don’t have, you certainly require tool for Linux recovery.
Resizing the partitions would delete all your data, thus the perfect scanning procedure to scan the hard drive and hence Linux data recovery software is required.
