very messed up reiserfs with bad blocks

[Sebastiaan <S.Breedveld@ewi.tudelft.nl>]

Hi,

I have a problem with a reiserfs partition. Some days ago the drive
reported bad blocks, so I ran the badblocks program tried to fix the
filesystem with the badblocksoutput.

Assuming I fixed the badblock list with 'reiserfsck --badblocks' I tried
to access some (reported broken) files on that partition. This gave some
I/O errors, so I thought I had to rebuild the tree (reiserfsck --badblocks
--rebuild-tree). This failed, and the filesystem became unmountable (mount
fails with 'mount: Not a directory').

I ran another badblock scan, and the number of badblocks grew
substantially (from 11 in the first run to 177 in the second).
--rebuild-tree failed again and again.

Now the weird thing occured: running a third badblock scan didn't increase
the amount of badblocks (as I should expect, since the badblock program
runs on a lower level than the filesystem). It gave me 56 badblocks.


Now the following questions raised:
- what causes the amount of bad blocks to fluctuate?
- how can I access the filesystem again?

I know the drive is bad, so I am only into copying the contents off it as
soon as possible. I have the idea the file allocation table is corrupted.
Now --rebuild-tree won't help me, so I was hoping there is a backup of
this FAT on the drive somewhere. I couldn't find it, so how does one deal
with this thing under reiser?

Thanks a lot in advance!
Sebastiaan


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