Ext3 users - Nov 2005 - ext3-image doesn't mount anymore and reports errors

Hi folks,

we made an image of a partition by using dd. Original filesystem is
ext3 (4k block-size).
My colleague was able to mount this image once (using mount with "-o
loop").
Since then anytime we try to mount it, it ends in the following error-message:

ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: Device or resource busy
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

We also tried to mount it on another system than our backup-machine -
without success but with the same error.

Fsck.ext3 ends in lots of inode-errors and the following one:

Error while iterating over blocks in inode 131736: Illegal triply
indirect block found
e2fsck: aborted

Using an alternative superblock (32768) results in the same error.

Due to the fact that this is our only backup of this machine it is
really important for us at least to read this image and get some data
off it.
We are also willing to pay a fair amount of money for recovery.

Is somebody able to help out quickly in this situation?

Regards

Tobias

PS: Please don't blame me for this backup-strategy! :-)

Hi folks,

please excuse, if this message come through twice. Seems like I have
some troubles with this gmail-account.

We made an image of a partition by using dd. Original filesystem is
ext3 (4k block-size).
My colleague was able to mount this image once (using mount with "-o
loop").
Since then anytime we try to mount it, it ends in the following error-message:

ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: Device or resource busy
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

We also tried to mount it on another system than our backup-machine -
without success but with the same error.

Fsck.ext3 ends in lots of inode-errors and the following one:

Error while iterating over blocks in inode 131736: Illegal triply
indirect block found
e2fsck: aborted

Using an alternative superblock (32768) results in the same error.

Due to the fact that this is our only backup of this machine it is
really important for us at least to read this image and get some data
off it.
We are also willing to pay a fair amount of money for recovery.

Is somebody able to help out quickly in this situation?

Regards

Tobias

PS: Please don't blame me for this backup-strategy! :-)

On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 04:27:53PM +0100, Tobias Orlam?nde
wrote:
> My colleague was able to mount this image once (using mount with "-o
loop").
> Since then anytime we try to mount it, it ends in the following
error-message:
> 
> ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: Device or resource busy
> mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Looking at the loop driver (drivers/block/loop.c), the handler for
LOOP_CLR_FD checks a ref-count on the loop device.  If the ref-count is
bigger than 1 (the ioctl call holds a reference), it returns -EBUSY,
which corresponds to the error you're getting (device or resource busy).

Does anything else on the system have a handle open to the loop device
file?  What about the image file?  Do you have any other loopback-mounts
running at the time?  Does it help to manually do the losetup operation
on a known-free loop device, then mount the loop device itself (without
-o loop)?  (You will have to "losetup -d" the device after you unmount
it, also -- normally umount handles that.)

What does "losetup -f" say?

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