Trusting this exact situation has not been addressed.
External, old hard drive was in a RAID with another drive, just briefly to test and only as two separate drives, not contiguous or arrayed otherwise. When removed from that unit (have unsuccessfully tried to use it in the unit again) it now will not mount. Have spent a week trying to rescue, image, fsck, etc. Forced to use alternate superblock, all this new to me.
Only things that worked are: 1) trial rescue software on my Mac gave me some existing files, and 2) ddrescue in Ubuntu imaged it. The image is in numbered directories, 500GB of data that I could never sort through to rename properly. Would like to image again but with directories, don't know how. Tried testdisk foremost, magicrescue. Dazed and confused still.
While I may be off on a tangent, I would like to see the proper directory/file structure on the disk, get it all safely to another drive, and move on. I may have done so many odd things to it, that structure may now be corrupt. Thinking it's not a hardware fail right now...
I think the current crisis is trying to resolve the matter below, though I have been unsuccessful hunting down how to fix it or move forward. It used to give the message about had not being cleanly removed, but doesn't anymore. Even though I answer yes to fixes in fsck, it asks them again every time, so they never really fix, guessing because it cannot write. Any ideas appreciated. Thanks!
~$ sudo fsck.ext4 -vf -b 32768 /dev/sde1 -y
e2fsck 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Block bitmap differences: -(65536--67276) -(67584--83261) -(83968--98303) Fix? yes
Padding at end of inode bitmap is not set. Fix? yes
Error writing block 1 (Input/output error). Ignore error? yes
IMAGE: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
28690 inodes used (0.09%, out of 30531584)
11528 non-contiguous files (40.2%)
6 non-contiguous directories (0.0%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 0/0/0
Extent depth histogram: 28572/108
115598494 blocks used (94.68%, out of 122096384)
0 bad blocks
1 large file
27552 regular files
1129 directories
0 character device files
0 block device files
0 fifos
0 links
0 symbolic links (0 fast symbolic links)
0 sockets
------------
28681 files
Error writing block 1 (Input/output error). Ignore error? yes
