Re: Recovering filesystem with large number of orphaned inodes?

[Brett Lymn <blymn%internode.on.net@localhost>]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 09:18:30AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 09:34:07PM -0500, John D. Baker wrote:
> > I'd like to give the best possible chance to recover data but I don't
> > really feel like having to approve 65534 reconnections.  I'd like to use
> > the "-y" option, but have fsck exit if it can't attach the orphan file.
> > Then I can move the "lost+found" directory out of the way and start over
> > with a new one.
> 
> Not helpful for you directly, but:
> I wonder if we should modify fsck to stop linking there at (say) 0xf000 links
> and start creating sub-directories where to link further inodes.
> 

The problem with doing that is that you are allocating blocks on a
broken file system at best it may fail in "interesting" ways at worst
you could stomp some of the data that you are trying to rescue.  It is
too late now but common wisdom was when the filesystem was healthy to cd
into lost+found and allocate a lot of files and then remove them so the
directory has a lot of "pre-allocated" slots to create entries on.

-- 
Brett Lymn