[mythtv-users] Last ditch call for help :(

[nowhere]

Hey everyone,

My root filesystem seems to be corrupted and I am unable to repair it.
I'm just posting here as a last ditch effort to try and recover some of
my 277 videos recorded before the crash.

When booted from a rescue disk and typing e2fsck -f /dev/hda2 I get an
error stating group descriptors look bad then it craps out stating
invalid arguments while reading journal inode.

If I try to remove the journal using tune2fs essentially converting back
to ext2 and thus not needing the journal, I get the same error - invalid
arguments while reading journal inode.

I'm not really sure what brought this failure on but it started with my
dist upgrade of mythtv-suite from 0.15 cvs to 0.16 latest apt rpms.
After that the system was terribly unstable, backend dying with no info
in the logs, frontend freezing etc. On 0.15 it was rock stable for 8
months with only a couple reboots in that time to do upgrades and such.

Then while out of the country the WAF took a severe hit when she could
not get the backend to restart after a crash. After a $40 phone call I
was unable to determine what was wrong. When I got back, I found that
the xfs /video filesystem had errors. I repaired them and the backend
would restart and I was back running but still unstable (3 backend
crashes in 1.5 weeks). There were a couple corrupted divx files I had
placed on the system to watch and deleting them caused some more errors
and I repaired the xfs system again. Then tonight, after watching the
Veep Debate, and hitting the grocery I come home to find the screen
paused and the frontend frozen requiring killing and restarting. The
front would restart ok but it seemed the backend was gone since live tv
would not start and no recording showed up. I ssh in and discover that
ls is no longer a valid command meaning the root partition has been
corrupted as stated above. Note that these two partitions / and /video
are on two different physical drives... No that's not QUITE true. About
60GB of the 260GB of the /video LVM is on the same drive as / .  Anyone
thinking bad harddrive?

So given the fact that I have learned everything I know about filesytem
commands tonight, does anyone have any last suggestions before I simply
start over from scratch with FC2?

Thanks for reading!

Eric