The disk check command in Linux, fsck, runs in five phases. The first phase is to check the data blocks and its size while in second one, this check for the pathnames. Then in the subsequent phases, connectivity, reference counts and cylinder groups are checked respectively. If at the second phase, in which the pathnames are checked, the fsck fails, the situation could be drastic.
This can happen due to inode issues. You may get error messages like:
“Root inode is not a directory. Clear?”
This is the clear indication that the root inode has got corrupted somehow. Now what are inodes? The inode in Linux file systems are the data structures which hold all the information of the files stored except its name and data. This can be referred as the unique number given to each file and for each file there in an individual inode. The file is accessed by this inode only.
Now in this particular case, the root inode which is usually the inode number 2 has got damaged. This is the first inode of the file system and represents the root or starting point of the filesystem.
If you agree to ‘Yes’ in this error message, then this will delete the parent entry of each inode from the root directory. Then in the third phase of fsck, the root inode is attempted to recover, but if this fails, another error message displays:
“Cannot Allocate Root Inode”
The situation to be weird to those who possess lots of critical and important data on their Linux systems as this is the stage where they can lose their data. The only option to recover the data is to have the Linux recovery tools which gain the capability to retrieve the data even in the filesystem issues.
These tools are called Linux data recovery software which makes use of the influential algorithms to drag out the data. Once written data does not move from the hard drive, until you overwrite it, so Linux recovery software go along this fact and put maximum efforts to recover the data.
Data recovery Linux is not so easy job to be done through any of the software but instead demands high technology from the software. These Linux recovery utilities provide an abstract view to the users.
Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery software works as the ultimate solution for data recovery Linux. Valuable for Ext2, Ext3 and Reiser FS file systems, this software uses the most powerful scanning algorithms to recover the data. Giving the interactive user interface to the users, it does the complete job for Linux data recovery. The software recognizes each file type.
