We have a detailed file system, blocks and superblocks int this post. We will try to mount an alternate superblock. As we know super blocks hold information about the file system. If our primary superblock is corrupted or unusable we can use alternative superblocks.

List Super Blocks

To mount with an alternative superblock we will list superblocks and alternatives.

$ dumpe2fs /dev/vda1 |grep -i superblock

To run dumpe2fs command we need root privileges. We grep only superblock related line of the output.

Mount File System

We will mount the file system regular mount command by providing different arguments like below

$ mount sb=32768 /dev/vda1 /mnt

Or we can use by providing as an option

$ mount -o sb=32768 /dev/vda1 /mnt

Mount command uses by default block 1. However, we have defined different superblock number with an option parameter