<p>Mr. Stokes, I assume you know the role of /etc/fstab. If it does not agree with your drives/partitions or file system types, you will get errors on boot.<br>
You are suggesting your system cannot boot, but what is interesting
is that your error is on /dev/sdb. Your first hard drive is probably /dev/sda or /dev/hda,
and that is likely the bootable one.</p>
<p>When you say you can't boot, you actually should say WHERE in the boot process it
fails. Do you hang in the middle, or at the beginning? </p>
<p>Do you HAVE two drives? If the second one is messing up your boot, disconnect it for a
while. Once you are booted, you can reconnect it and you have many more tools
at your disposal. (You could probably even disable in BIOS and not have to mess with
cables).</p>
<p>You ABSOLUTELY should be able to rescue your drive with a rescue CD (or a second bootable harddrive). Perhaps your superblock did get trashed ... the drive should be rescuable anyway, but you definitely want to boot on another drive. In fact, if you DON'T have two drives, you might want to put another one in just so you can get a full linux distro going from which to rescue your other drive.</p>
<p>If it IS a bad superblock, you can use a different one!</p>
<pre><code># dumpe2fs /dev/sdb2 | grep superblock
</code></pre>
<p>You can then take one of your alternate superblocks and use it in either fsck or mount.<br>
Let's say you found an alternate superblock at 32768.
Fsck first ...</p>
<pre><code># fsck -b 32768 /dev/sdb2
</code></pre>
<p>For more info -- see this excellent post:
<a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/recover-bad-superblock-from-corrupted-partition/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/recover-bad-superblock-from-corrupted-partition/</a></p>
