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[Michael Mess <1375640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for the information.
I was thinking, that I have destroyed the extents and other features of the ext4 file system by using a tool that is not aware of the special ext4 features, leading to filesystem coruption.
What happens, if I hit CTRL-C during fsck? Can that leave the filesystem in a even more inconsistent state?

I used a SSD, so it is likely that resetting the system could have damaged the file system.
Probably it is a good idea to keep the /home directory on a separate partition. 
This is how I used to do; when there was file system corruption in the past (mostly dying disks), the root filesystem got broken, but the home partition only had none or minor issues, so recovery was always easy.
But it is not the default when installing ubuntu and for this installation I didn't care for it.

Also the nvidia driver could have caused the damage by overwriting memory which finally led to the crash.
But if that was nvidia driver's memory corruption, it is likely that it could also also hit a separate home partition or any other mounted drive.

Is there a way to recover the file system manually? There is still hope
that the areas with data are mostly still present. I still keep a copy
of the disk image and I am still trying some recovery tools on a copy of
that image.

fsck.ext4 resulted in that some data still exists, some files have gone to lost+found , but many files seem to be lost (the partition now appears to be mostly unused).
It seems that much space has been unallocated and as a result some files could have been partially overwritten during system boot, when the system writes to the disk.

As far as I know, fsck.ext4 does not scan the whole disk for files to be linked to lost+found, but only these areas that have been marked as used to improve speed.
Is it possible to force searching the whole disk image for existing fragments of the file system that are not allocated as used and do not have any linkage to the existing filesytem any more?
I know that this could deliver much garbage (very old files) that have been deleted or overwritten far before and are not of use, but probably it could be useful to recover some useful data where the linkage to the file system has been lost and that have been unallocated by filesystem coruption. 

Could you provide me a link to current documentation of ext4 and fsck?
Where can I get the sources?

Can you recommend some good open source recovery tools?

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to e2fsprogs in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1375640

Title:
  fsck should do some sanity checks to avoid damaging an ext3/ext4 file
  system

Status in “e2fsprogs” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  After some crashes due to a broken nvidia driver, the system didn't boot and presented me a shell to manually repair the file system.
  Then I didn't think and typed fsck without the -t ext4 parameter and the program asked me many questions, if I want to fix something which I answered with y.
  After some time I remembered, that I forgot to specify the -t ext4 parameter, but the filesystem was broken already, so it was already too late, when I do Ctrl-C.
  And I didn't think about that there could be already severe file system corruption, making the things even worse.

  Thus I would recommend that a warning message is displayed, when calling fsck manually with the wrong filesystem type.
  Also a big note that this is now the right time to make an image backup of the disk could be helpful for people like me that always tell other people how important backups are before working on something, but sometimes fail to make one, because they forget to turn their brain on before starting work. ;-)

  I would expect that when calling fsck on a filesystem, not just defaults are used, but the filesystem type is determined.
  Then a big scary warning message should say something like this:

  "
  You have called fsck on an ext4 filesystem. 
  For an ext4 file system you *must* specify the filesystem type with option "-t ext4", otherwise severe damage to the file system will occur.
  NOTE: It is highly recommended that you make a backup image of your disk device before you continue, so that you have something to recover from, if things go wrong. 
  This can be especially important, if the disk drive hardware you are trying to recover the filesystem on, is possibly dying.
  You can use dd_rescue or similar tools to try to get a disk image to recover as much as possible of your data from a damaged hard drive.

  Are you really sure, you want to continue (and probably damage the file system)? (yes/NO)
  "

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