superblock errors?

fsck /dev/sda
fsck 1.42.1 (17-Feb-2012)
e2fsck 1.42.1 (17-Feb-2012)
/sbin/e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
/sbin/e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda

Hi, I had an XP installed for years, never a problem besides those created by Win crap. Installed Ubuntu 11.10 about 15 days under a new 5gb partition created by the Ubuntu installer. Everything ran just fine. Trying to open a Gparted since about 1 week, it always says that I dont have any partition, and that's all about whole drive unallocated space

I need to take about another 5 gb from the windows partition into the linux partition with GParted but I can't just do anything. I just ran fsck command on /dev/sda and I got that 'superblock' stupid message which I can't understand. And EVEN in the case its an error indeed its an error created by the Ubuntu installer while installing itself in the new partition created

fdisk -lu shows me:

Disk /dev/sda: 35.9 GB, 35939409408 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4642 cylinders, total 70194159 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcccdcccd
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 57471119 28735528+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 57462782 70187039 6362129 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 57462784 68622335 5579776 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 68624384 70193151 784384 82 Linux swap

How can I do to fix the 'superblock' issue ?

After some research, I found out fsck doesn't work on ntfs-based filesystems. After installing ntfsprogs through sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs it seems it worked.

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /sbin/fsck.ntfs
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /sbin/fsck.ntfs-3g
ntfsfix /dev/sda1

I was able to finally run a check unto /dev/sda1

1 Answer

/dev/sda is the wrong device to run fsck on. sda is the whole disk. Your Linux filesystem is on /dev/sda5.