I was in a state of mild panic after my beloved laptop had a hard freeze and did not come back due to a corrupted Btrfs filesystem. Thankfully it was a simple fix with a few steps. Since searching for my problem didn’t present my solution, this is to help anyone that may stumble into the same problem.
Bottom Line Up Front: Having backups is important and this fix is risky as you can lose data. I was fortunate in that I didn’t lose anything but this could have gone very differently. Having only emergency mode or also called single-user mode to work out of can be intimidating. This should hopefully help you get through this hiccup.
The Problem
I plugged my laptop into a dock station that is admittedly a bit of a weird device but I had used it numerous times. The computer froze up, a very uncommon occurrence. With since the machine was not responding and I couldn’t remember the Magic SysRq key combination, Iwent for the hard power off. I have been running openSUSE for well over a decade and haven’t had hard system shutdown ever kill a system but this time, my system wouldn’t boot, and the partition wouldn’t mount.
I suspected a damaged partition table, but not knowing where to start was my biggest hurdle. Searches on the error also relieved unrelated issues. I was rather irritated as I just don’t have problems like this in Linux, but there is always an opportunity for a first!
The Solution
While in single-user mode, I entered my root password then I ran the Btrfs check to diagnose the problem.
btrfs check /dev/nvme0n1p2Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of this step and I certainly do not want to reproduce it but the next step was to repair the damaged partition table.
btrfs check --repair /dev/nvme0n1p2The fix worked like a charm! After eight, nail biting steps, the repair was successful and the computer was back to normal operation.
Note: Back up data first if possible; this can cause data loss, depending on the level of corruption. Back up your data!
Final Thoughts
Once I knew these steps, it was surprisingly quick and painless to complete. I don’t know what the mechanism was from plugging in that dock station that caused the computer to lock up and why this particular hard-shutdown caused the file system corruption but it does speak to the resiliency of modern Linux, the file systems and recovery tools that I could be back up and running. I am glad that I didn’t have to reinstall openSUSE Tumbleweed on my Framework Laptop 13 as that would have been rather inconvenient.
Don’t let a filesystem corruption incident intimidate you. That single-user mode screen, although not immediately helpful in its appearance is your way in to fix what has broken. Save yourself a re-installation of your operating system and give this or something like this a try. Feel free to comment or email me@CubicleNate.com if you need more help!
References
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/btrfs-check.8.html
https://get.opensuse.org
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