[SOLVED] Trashed filesystem and grub

[Zeroangel]

I have a dual boot system with several partitions. My windows partition is /dev/sda1 and my mint partition is /dev/sda5

Tonight I decided to hook my PC up to my main TV in order to watch movies on it, but right after the grub screen went to boot into linux, I noticed my keyboard wasnt plugged in so I flicked the power switch to the 'off' position before any of the bootup text appeared on the screen.

Upon rebooting, X would not start -- warning me that the filesystem was read-only.

So I ran "sudo fsck /dev/sda5"

Well, it came up with a message saying that the ext4 journal was bad, and asked me to clear it (thus temporarily making it into an ext2 filesystem). I selected yes, then I ran fsck again.

This time there were hundreds of errors. Missing inodes, bad symlinks, etc etc. Some of the errors were even illogical looking, like the folder ".." having errors.

I just held the 'y' key on my keyboard hoping it would be over soon but the errors just kept coming. Eventually they stopped and fsck asked me to reboot. So I typed in "sudo shutdown now" and "sudo reboot" but they werent working.

I hard rebooted and after posting I was greeted to a black screen

"Error 15" was the sum of it.

As a result, I booted into my "Linux Mint 7" LiveCD and tried to run fsck, but fsck gave me a message about a bad superblock, or wrong FS type.

I opened gparted to see what was up, and according to gparted, "/dev/sda5" was an "unknown filesystem type"

So, from the liveCD, I installed and ran 'sudo testdisk /dev/sda" and it recognized /dev/sda5 as an ext4 partition, so I wrote that configuration to disk -- and testdisk warned me that the configuration wouldnt take effect until the system was rebooted.

I rebooted, and nothing happened. So I ran testdisk again, looked inside of the partition and there were no other folders apart from lost+found.

What should I do from here?

[Hal343]

It looks like everything is lost. You will have to re-install.

[Zeroangel]

Yes, I thought this might be the case. Luckily, most of my files were stored on a big 'shared files' partition that I shared with my windows install (symlinked folders: music, pictures, videos, downloads, etc...) just in case situations like an OS getting trashed ever happened.

Now that I know theres nothing I can do, i'll just go ahead with the reinstall, since I'm already starting to miss my linux environment.

domo, arigatou