What to do when superblock is corrupted in linux?

Superblock is one of the common meta data structures,and its corruption may lead to inaccessibility of the hard drive and need of a good Linux data recovery tool arises to recover back your data. Linux recovery becomes even more essential when your hard drive becomes inaccessible and you fails to understand either the error message or the cause of it.

Superblock corruption is one of the many possible errors like intrusion of virus/malware,partition table corruption  or file system corruption etc. In a LINUX hard disk, the partition is subdivided into multiple file system blocks. Most blocks store user data and some blocks store information of the file system itself or the meta data.

Scenario:
If you are trying to boot your PC, and encounter a serious error where the whole data stored in your hard drive becomes inaccessible. The error message being displayed may read as follows:

Error:
“The filesystem size is 12453462 blocks
The physical size of the device is 10093482 blocks
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt”

After receiving this error, when you manually try to run the command FSCK to resolve the above mentioned issue, you finds another message (error)  which reads as follows:

“Error reading block 10125318
while doing inode scan. Ignore error?

   Error reading block 10125319
while doing inode scan. Ignore error?”

Cause:
The primary reason behind these error messages is either the corruption of the partition table or the corruption of superblock.

Resolution:
·     Unmount all the partitions using the command ‘unmount-a’ .
·     Choose the alternate superblock that is used to be with the operating system and mount the file system.
·     Try to repair the corrupted hard drive partitions using the command 'e2fsck' command.
·     If the above measure fails to repair the hard drive partition, try to recreate all the partitions.

Recreating the partition will erase all the previously saved data in the hard disk and to recover them back, you need a powerful Linux data recovery tool.