[PLUG] Cannot get ext2 partition on usb enclosure

[John Lavin <jlavin@wayreth.net>]

Hi, and Happy New Year All,

I bought myself a usb 2.0 hard drive enclosure to put an extra internal
30 gig drive I had come into possession of.  I started fresh and created
a new ext2 partition, formatted it and copied my mp3's over to
re-organize and fill out all the id3 tags.  This went fine yesterday and
I got a lot of them done.

This morning when I booted up, I couldn't mount the partition:
# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       or too many mounted file systems

I went into fdisk and there were NO partitions listed.  Argh!

Next, went into parted and tried to do a rescue, knowing that it was a
partition that spanned the whole drive.  I didn't find any partitions
and got this error:

Using /dev/sda
Error: Unable to open /dev/sda - unrecognised disk label.

went back to fdisk and noticed the following:

Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF
disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory
only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the
previous content won't be recoverable.

...

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
w(rite)

I hit w and went back to parted.  I could now recognize the drive as:
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-28629.562 megabytes

...but when I tried the rescue command using a from of: 0.0 and
28629.562 I found no partitions.

So, I thought maybe I didn't see the invalid disk label and I didn't
actually write the partition to the drive, but the data could still be
there.  I did a:
(parted) mkpart ext2 0.0 28629.562

To create a partition without creating a filesystem.  I see the
partition but still no good:

# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       or too many mounted file systems

# file -sL /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: data

in the logs I see:
Jan  2 08:43:00 elemental kernel: VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev
sd(8,1).

So... its still not finding the filesystem.

My question would be - if I do a mkpartfs instead of a mkpart,
will I be overwriting my data?  Is there any other way to get this
data back?  I have all my mp3's but I spent a lot of time organizing
them yesterday.

TIA,
-john

-- 
John Lavin <jlavin@wayreth.net> http://www.wayreth.net

 My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.  --Thomas Paine

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