Filesystem corrupted: "Sorry, could not find valid secondary superblock"

[Eric Sandeen]

Nicolas STRANSKY wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm using Debian Lenny with xfsprogs 2.9.8-1lenny1 and a kernel
> 2.6.26-2-amd64. Recently I had some disk failures on a 1.5TB RAID 5
> array, which is now running in a degraded mode but the xfs filesystem on
> this array is inconsistent. I can mount it with -o ro,norecovery and
> read some files, but I can't read most of them.
> Using xfs_repair, I tried to repair the filesystem. It went for 12
> hours, displaying these messages:
> "found candidate secondary superblock...
> unable to verify superblock, continuing..."
> and finally:
> "Sorry, could not find valid secondary superblock
> Exiting now."
> 
> Is there anything else I could do to repair the filesystem? Upgrade to a
> newer version of xfsprogs? Is it possible that there is no valid
> secondary superblock on the whole disk or are they just not found?
> 
> Thanks a lot for any help,
> NS.

xfs_repair needs to be smarter about this; I at least wish it'd say
-why- the candidate was not valid.

Can you include the whole repair output?  Then maybe we can direct
you to some xfs_db jujitsu to examine the fs.

Trying newer xfsprogs would not be a -bad- idea...

-Eric