Ubuntu
e2fsprogs package

  1. Bug #711799
  2. Comment #5

Comment 5 for bug 711799

Revision history for this message
Theodore Ts'o (tytso) wrote :

The fix for this is in e2fsprogs 1.41.13, but I strongly recommend you fix this by going to e2fsprogs 1.41.14, which which has additional bug fixes. From the RELEASE-NOTES file:

Fixed a bug in e2fsck where if both the original and backup superblock
are invalid in some way, e2fsck will fail going back to the original
superblock because it didn't close the backup superblock first, and
the exclusive open prevented the file system from being reopened.

So this is a problem that won't occur for a cases of file system corruption, but for a user that does have both the original and backup superblocks corrupted, the results are rather catastrophic, since the only way they will be able to fix it is to boot a rescue CD and then run e2fsck from that rescue CD.

I can fetch the specific git commit which fixed this bug, but if you're using e2fsprogs 1.41.12, you really should upgrade...