Linux – how to fix EXT2-fs (sda1): error: ext2_lookup deleted inode referenced XXXX

Ok, I just found half the answer to my question:

...and what can I do about that?

Apparently I can make the device node myself. I plugged the USB stick into my laptop and found it enumared as:

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8,  0 Apr  3 13:15 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8,  1 Apr  3 13:15 /dev/sda1

So, block devices with major number 8 and minor 0 and 1. I checked the long listing of the /dev on my embedded device and found that no other device was using major version 8, so I made the nodes manually:

-sh-4.2# mknod /dev/sda b 8 0
-sh-4.2# mknod /dev/sda1 b 8 1

Then I made a directory and mounted the new sda1 to that directory:

-sh-4.2# cd /mnt/
-sh-4.2# mkdir usbdrive
-sh-4.2# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive/
-sh-4.2# ls /mnt/usbdrive/
libEGL.so     libsrv_um.so

And now I can see the contents of my USB drive. So that answers the "what can I do about that". I still have a question of why I need to do this manually on my embedded board. There must be something... maybe in the USB driver, that does all this automatically.

I encountered this error before as well. A manual file system check fixes it, but you can consider some files lost already.

Syntax:

fsck -y

It is best to do this in single user mode.