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I'm trying to write reference material for a friend who has power outages a couple of times a year which affect their linux server. This person is not well versed in linux systems administration, so I want to include screenshots and a fairly comprehensive description of what to expect, and how to respond.

One of the more common questions that comes up (a couple times a year; they're in a lightning-prone area) is how to recover from a corrupt or missing superblock in the root filesystem.

I have documentation on how to fix the problem, but it assumes you have a nodding acquaintance with linux and console-based systems administration. What I'd like to do is setup a KVM on my server, crash the root filesystem on purpose, and take screenshots of the initial discovery along with the steps to recover.

I cannot seem to trigger that missing/corrupt superblock issue. I've been trying things like:

(/dev/sda2 is where the root LVM partition lives) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=1024 count=1 seek=1

(/dev/mapper/vg_sys-lv_root is the root LVM partition) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/vg_sys-lv_root bs=4096 count=1

Neither of these work; they both seem to create mayhem, but in very different ways from the run-of-the-mill missing/corrupt superblock.

Is there any way to simulate this scenario on a KVM guest (i.e. without setting up a machine and then pulling the power cord out of it)?

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Have you considered just making sure that you have a good backup system that is easy to restore from? Then you just have to write one set of directions. – Zoredache Aug 9 '11 at 22:14
@Zoredache unless I'm mistaken, repairing this particular problem takes only a few minutes, while restoring the whole system could take hours. – jdcasey Aug 9 '11 at 22:18
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Make sure you're deleting all superblocks, including the backup superblocks

dumpe2fs /dev/path_to_your_volume | grep -i superblock

From there, you can kick all the superblocks down like so many tinkertoys.

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...but am I doing the kicking correctly? I'm getting the list of superblock locations using the command you mentioned, and getting the block size using: dumpe2fs /dev/foo | grep -i 'block size' ...if I'm doing all that correctly, is the dd command I'm using correct to knock out the superblock and trigger that error message? In my testing, if I knock out the 0-offset on the LVM root partition (0-offset being the first superblock it lists) it goes pretty haywire and panics...no chance to fix it. – jdcasey Aug 9 '11 at 22:46
@John Are you blowing it up with the filesystem mounted? If you're needing to reproduce a power outage that screws up the superblock, you may need to do your artificial corruption while booted to other media. – Shane Madden Aug 9 '11 at 23:00
@jdcasey If you're overwriting all superblocks on a volume, then you're certainly hosing the filesystem right proper. Is it exactly what needs to be done to get the error you want? In theory, it should certainly give you a missing superblock error. – WesleyDavid Aug 10 '11 at 1:47
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