Did my disk got corrupted? can i fix it?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi, kind people of EndeavourOS,
I installed Endeavour (with Budgie DE) 2 days ago to replace my old Manjaro, never used it before and while the system is running fine, I ran into a problem.
All my user files are stored on a separate disk. I used to have it mounted as the /home folder, but I did not attempt to use it as such again. The installation used solely the main disk, this one shouldn’t have been affected at all.
However, when I tried to copy some files from it, it failed, giving a “input/output error”. I was still able to mount it and see the folders, but I couldn’t load any of its contents. Right now I can’t even mount it anymore.

  • it isn’t exactly new, but smartctl says it passed the smart test and doesn’t seem to be failing
  • running fsck got me this:
fsck from util-linux 2.40.4
e2fsck 1.47.2 (1-Jan-2025)
ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block
fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a valid ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
 or
    e2fsck -b 32768 <device>

/dev/sda contains `DOS/MBR boot sector, extended partition table (last)' data

The device should absolutely contain an ext4 filesystem. I do not know how to interpret this. Running the suggested commands produced an identical error.
I’d be very happy for any explanations or guidance. thank you for making it down here

2

Did you try to fsck an entire disk and not a filesystem?

3

can you explain what do you mean, please? sudo fsck /dev/sda is what i used

4

Can you share the output of lsblk -o name,type,fstype,size

5 
sda         disk        465,8G
└─sda1      part ext4   465,8G
sdb         disk        298,1G
└─sdb1      part ntfs   298,1G
sdc         disk        476,9G
├─sdc1      part vfat     100M
├─sdc2      part           16M
├─sdc3      part ntfs   476,3G
└─sdc4      part ntfs     537M
nvme0n1     disk        476,9G
├─nvme0n1p1 part vfat       1G
├─nvme0n1p2 part ext4   441,5G
└─nvme0n1p3 part swap    34,4G

sda should be the disk in question, the nvme drive is where the OS lives

6

Try running fsck on /dev/sda1

7

I did, this is the result

fsck from util-linux 2.40.4
e2fsck 1.47.2 (1-Jan-2025)
/dev/sda1: clean, 404537/30531584 files, 72374272/122096384 blocks
8

That looks good.

9

I rebooted the PC and it seems all is good now! Thank you a lot, kind internet stranger.