NewsForge: Recovering Linux Files and Filesystems

“A common nightmare among computer users is losing data due to
filesystem corruption. This can happen because of errors introduced
during a system crash, filesystem driver bugs (particularly when
using non-Linux drivers to access Linux partitions), human error
involving low-level disk utilities, or other factors. All Linux
filesystems include disk-check tools, but they differ in many
details.

“Most filesystems provide utilities that scan the filesystem’s
contents for internal consistency. This tool can detect, and often
correct, errors such as mangled directories, bad time stamps,
inodes that point to the wrong part of the disk, and so on. In
Linux, the fsck utility serves as a front-end to
filesystem-specific checking tools, which usually have names of the
form fsck.filesystem, where filesystem is the filesystem name, such
as jfs or ext2. If you need to check a filesystem manually, you can
either call fsck, which then calls the filesystem-specific utility;
or you can call the filesystem-specific program directly…”

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