[MiNT] Minixfs partition problem

[Johan Klockars <rand@cd.chalmers.se>]

I've not used MiNT for quite a while, but now when I boot with it my
minixfs partitions seem to have been corrupted somehow.

At bootup, I get a message saying that there aren't any . or .. entries
in the root (on one of the partitions, there is no mention of the other),
which certainly sounds like a really bad thing.
fsck -n e:  doesn't report anything at all, it just returns after a
a second or two.
I tried reforming the root directory (fsck -d 2 -R (I'm almost positive
that I'd set things up for 30 character file names)), but that didn't
help anything.

If anyone has any ideas about what to do here, I'm _very_ interested.
Even just locating the names (and preferably the dates) of the files
on the partitions would be very helpful. I _think_ I don't have anything
there that isn't available elsewhere too, but I'd obviously like to _know_
that before reinitializing...

I've looked at parts of the partitions using a sector editor and there
are some kind of Minix markers in the first sectors as well as some
recognizable file data here and there, so it does not seem like anything
really catastrophic has occured.


Are there perhaps some lower level file system check/repair tools?
If necessary, I'll try to write some myself, but perhaps the structure
of the file system makes this 'impossible' (given that fsck apparently
can't do anything)? It's been a long time since I studied the old UNIX
file systems (which I assume minixfs resembles), and I don't recall
much besides the existense of the inodes.

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