Help me save my Fedora

Ask Fedora
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I was browsing on my laptop and mindlessly set it aside on a pillow when I was about to get up from the couch. The laptop gently fell off the pillow maybe two inches when screen went black and power light turned off, but my num lock key was still lit.

I try power cycling but with both Fedora Silverblue 43 entries, updated yesterday and day before, I get this error about XFS corruption.

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I probably made things worse trying to do an xfs_repair, it didn’t help at least, so I grabbed a USB which happens to have Fedora Silverblue 41 and try the Troubleshooting recovery. It fails too:

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But when I boot the installer I can see my home directory if I enter the LUKS password.

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At this point I just want to recover that much… everything important is backed up but I’ve had this installation for a good while (F41 USB was for my daughter’s laptop) and there’s some random bits I’d prefer not to lose if I can help it.

I’m pretty much a Linux noob even though I’ve been using it for a while. Can I save this installation by re-installing only root and boot and preserving home? I’ve heard others mention it but want to be a little more cautious at this point, and the rest of the information was for if I can’t.

Thanks for the help!

2

Before attempting filesystem repairs, it is best to save an image of the disk in case a repair attempt fails. Decades ago my work used SGI IRIX64 with XFS and the unreliable spinning drives available then. Repairs on XFS were often needed and resulted in working filesystem (missing some data) unless the drive had failed. We had backups and could restore filesystems to their state the night before the filesystem problem.

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3

Yes. You can do this in the installer.

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Thank you! I made an FSB43 USB and just remounted all my previous partitions in the installer, clicking the “Reformat” box on everything but fedora-home. I just booted up and still have all my stuff :+1:

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