Forwarded message: request for help

[raman at crl.dec.com]

This is a friend of mine who seems to have gotten himself into a sticky
situation. His note is attached below;

From: net at netcom.com
To: raman
Subject: more linux woes
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 23:38:42 -0700


Raman,

cc of my posting to comp.linux.help. Any ideas?

Prasad
------
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Please please help! Lost work in Ext2-fs error!!
Distribution: comp
--text follows this line--

I am in a terrible bind. Please please help (whimper!!) - I am
prepared to pay any resonable compensation to fix the problem.

I am running Linux 1.3.4 with a 1GB SCSI drive on an Adaptec
controller.  The SCSI drive is the root and complete file system of
Linux. (There is also another 850MB IDE drive which is the C: drive of
DOS/Windows)

I was doing an innocuous find . -name foo -print, which gave me some
warnings about bad directory blocks (sorry, do not remember exact
error msg) - I proceeded to try to remove the files in the offending
directory and the system just hung with a bunch of ext2-fs error msgs.

When I rebooted from a backup floppy, the boot and hardware checks
went ok - Linux 1.3.4 loaded ok from the disk but I got this error -

EXT2-fs error (device 8/1): ext2_check_descriptors: Inode bitmap for
group 20 not in group (block 131079)!
EXT2-fs group descriptors corrupted.

MSDOS Beta 0.6 (compatibility level 0.4, fast msdos)
Mounting root
VFS: Mounted root (umsdos filesystem) readonly

The system hangs there.

This seems like a disk block failure. I have lost a lot of work on
this disk (I was about to setup some backup, but at this point I have
none). Please, please help me out if you can.  I am even willing to
pay for someone who might be willing to provide a solution.

Thanks,
Pras