Unable to mount/boot/read BTRFS Partition – how to fix it.

What happened?

For some reason my PC froze yesterday. I’m using Linux Mint and I have my home Folder on a BTRFS Partition on a Samsung SSD.
I had to switch the PC off, because there was nothing I could do. When I tried to reboot, I got the error Message that the BTRFS File System can’t be read.
So I was unable to boot into my System. Unfortunately I didn’t have a recent backup of my home Folder, so I really had to fix this Partition.
Fortunately I have 2 other Linux Distros installed on my PC, so I was able to boot into these.

But still no luck, I just couldn’t mount the BTRFS Partition.
I’ve spent the whole day with googling, booting and trying a million things to fix my Partition. Fortunately it wasn’t a Hardware Failure, so finally I got it working at the end of the day.

How I fixed it!

The Command btrfs rescue did the trick to finally get my BTRFS Partition working again.

There are 3 Subcommands:
chunk-recover [options]
super-recover [options]
zero-log

So in my case I’ve entered the following:

sudo btrfs rescue chunk-recover -y -v /dev/sde5

( -y Yes to all -v Verbose Mode )

It took about 10 Minutes on my 120 GB Partition. …after that I still wasn’t able to mount my Partition, so I’ve entered:

sudo btrfs rescue super-recover -y -v /dev/sde5

That was it, after that I was able to mount my BTRFS Partition and I didn’t use the zero-log subcommand.

From now on I will back up my Home Partition every day with the following command.

sudo rsync -v -a /home/ /media/path-to-another-hd-and-partition/

I’m also thinking about using a HDD instead of a SDD for my home Partition. As a Trader, I like to have my Computer as quiet as possible, that’s why I’m using a SSD, but stability comes first. I’ve also switched back to ext4, as I don’t really see any benefits in using btrfs on a Home PC.

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