On Wed, Sep 08, 2021 at 07:08:54PM -0400, brian wrote:

Here is an update of the error.  If something looks off, let me know and
I'll double check I transcribed correct.  Let me know if there is a way to
post a screenshot.

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XFS (dm-2): Metadata corruption detected at xfs_inode_buf_verify+0x14d/0x160
[xfs] xfs_inode block 0x1b5c1c0 xfs_inode_buf_verify
XFS (dm-2): Unmount and run xfs_repair
XFS (dm-2): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
ffffae6842564000: 16 49 77 8a 32 7e 72 52 14 bb 51 98 7c a5 2c 9a
.Iw.2~rR..Q.|.,.
ffffae6842564010: dd 28 4d 94 88 03 2b 8c 99 33 67 ca 6a d5 aa c9
.(M...+..3g.j...
ffffae6842564020: f8 f8 78 c7 90 fc f5 af 7f 95 03 07 0e 0c 4a 37
..x...........J7
ffffae6842564030: 7c f8 70 c7 09 14 c7 81 a5 a7 a7 cb a8 a8 28 b9
|.p...........(.
ffffae6842564040: 68 d1 a2 a0 73 f5 ae d5 73 94 23 3d 3d 5d 46 46
h...s...s.#--]FF
ffffae6842564050: 46 ca f9 f3 e7 3b 69 4c d3 94 6d db b6 75 14 3d
F....;iL..m..u.=
ffffae6842564060: 30 68 77 ec d8 e1 a4 d9 b7 6f 9f 0c 0b 0b 0b 32
)hw......o.....2
ffffae6842564070: 8e 9d 29 aa 03 4b 4c 4c 0c 52 66 29 a5 7c f4 d1
..)..KLL.Rf).|..
XFS (dm-2): metadata I/O error in “xlog_recov_do..(read#2)” at daddr 0x1b32
error 117

Ok, that doesn't contain inodes. It's not even recognisable
as filesystem metadata at all.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

My computer is an older CentOS 6 box (on my todo list to replace).  I have
an array of VirtualBox VMs.  All my data including VMs is in /home/brian
directory.  I run rsync to backup /home/brian directory to a USB drive. 
Rsync treats the files of the VM just like any other file.  I noticed that
the VMs can get corrupted if I leave them running during back up with rsync
so I normally shut them down.  For this instance, I didn't shut down the VM
when I launched rsync.

@Dave
Regarding your image file question, I don't believe the above is an image
file.  Rsync copies file by file.  And I can navigate to the USB like my
internal hdd.

Regarding the freeze files system, no I did not freeze the guest.

Regarding the older backups, I just have the rsync backup on a USB drive. 
I've been working with a copy from the USB to try at get this machine back,
thus the unmodified USB rsync that was taken while the machine was running
exists.

While rsync was running, I had Selenium running web app tests in Chrome. 
All the data from my program was being written to a shared folder.  Chrome
has it's own internal cache that could be changing but overall, I wouldn't
expect the file system to be changing too much especially the booting part.

Log recovery covers anything that changed in the filesystem - it has
nothing to do with what is being accessed by boot operations.

My ultimate goal is to get to the data on this VM.  I've tried to mount this
.vdi file in another instance of CentOS but have not been successful.  I may
spin up an Ubuntu instance to try to get to the data.  The data on this VM
can be recreated but I prefer not to have to redo the work.

'mount -o ro,norecovery <dev>' will allow you to skip log recovery
and hopefully let you navigate the filesystem. It will not be error
free, though, because log recovery is needed for that to occur.

If the filesystem looks mostly intact, copy all the data off it you
can. Then unmount it is and run xfs_repair -L <dev> on it to blow
away the log and repair any corruption found. This will cause data
loss, so don't do this unless you are prepared for it of have a
complete copy of the broken filesystem.

I'd highly recommend doing this with a recent xfs_repair, not the
tools that came with CentOS 6.

You could also do dry-run testing by taking a metadump of the broken
filesystem and restoring that to an image file and running reapir on
that image file. That will at least tell you how much of the
directory structure will be trashed and wht you'll be able to access
after repair.

It may be that mounting w/ norecovery is your best bet of recovering
the contents of the bad filesystems, so do that first...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com