wrong fs, bad operation, bad superblock

September 20, 2022

These old hard drives...

Superblock and codepage error when mounting.

You might find yourself in a situation, when you cannot mount a hard drive, seeing an error like the following:

mount: /mnt/test: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

A possible approach for ext4 filesystems would be the following:

• Let's assume the device partition is called /dev/sda1.
• In order to get any superblock backup block numbers, run:

$ sudo mke2fs -n /dev/mapper/sda1

• Then, run the following command using a <block_number> of the superblock backup block numbers from the output above:

$ sudo e2fsck -b <block_number> /dev/mapper/sda1

I have done this a few times with old drives with corrupt superblocks, and it worked quite well.

Note:

• Take a look at dmesg, sometimes it contains valuable information.

• For example:

  • I tried to mount a sdcard with the following command:

  bash $ sudo mount -o uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g),noatime /dev/sda1 /mnt/test/

  • and received the error above
  • dmesg revealed:

  EXT4-fs (sda1): Unrecognized mount option "uid=1000" or missing value

  • and I modified the command to:

  bash $ sudo mount -o noatime /dev/sda1 /mnt/test/