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Further ext2/ext3

Continued with my research on ext3. Fortunately, I found several specs, but getting information is terribly difficult. Problem is that there are thousands of results on either recovery of ext3 or information of what is it capable to do. The latter is especially annoying, as "ext3 specs" will always yield dozens of questions like "what is the biggest file size possible". Apart from that, you'll most likely end up on the man page.
What strikes is how useless the search engines have become; they have to capitulate before the sheer amount of repeated information.

Anyway, had good going until I ran into the trouble of determining where the superblock gets written when sparse_super is activated. I didn't realize that I do not even need that information, because proper block group layout is stored in the group descriptors; but I had interpreted them wrong. But at least I learned that doing my tests with a small filesystem (4 MB!) wasn't the best idea, as many of the structures just turn up on bigger filesystems / become more obvious there.

Alas, fatigue becomes imminent, so I'm done for today. Aside from that minor issue, I'm quite content with the progress made today. What helps a lot is PHP, which does a really wonderful job when prototyping / trying stuff. While the very notion of reading a filesystem with PHP may appear quite awkward, the wonderful thing is that PHP allows to focus on the issue as such. I shudder at the tought of having to use Java, where I would spend most of the time pondering which Collection is the right one.

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