Ext4: error loading journal

data-recoveryext4hard drive

I have an external hard drive with two partitions: A small FAT32 which is mostly empty and works fine and a large ext4 with tons of data, most of which isn't backed up.

The ext4 is visible, but can't be mounted. I get an "error loading journal" error. The drive is a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB. Roughly 30GB of that is FAT32 and the rest is the ext4. The light on the enclosure turns red when reading from the bad partition. It was made by Cavalry.

There wasn't any warning, but coincidentally, I've been thinking lately that I should get two large capacity drives for real backups.

Is there anything that can be done? I'm not even sure I have enough storage to backup everything even if it is redeemable.

Best Answer

Try mounting the hard disk from the command line:

  1. Find the device name of your external hard disk. Plug it in and do: dmesg | tail -n 20.

You should see something like:

[   19.357961] scsi 8:0:2:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST31000340AS     SD15 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[   19.359664] sd 8:0:2:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[   19.360820] sd 8:0:2:0: [sdc] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
[   19.485445]  sdc1 sdc2

In my case it would be called sdc

  1. Mount partition 2 on /mnt with explicit type ext4: sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdc2 /mnt
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