xfs_repair -L /dev/sdb1 The -L flag is XFS’s last resort. It zeroes out the log, discarding all pending transactions. It’s dangerous—like performing surgery with a fire axe. You lose any operations that hadn’t been written to disk. But without it, the log was a poison pill preventing any repair.

"Alright, Jenkins," she muttered. "Let's see what you broke."

Lena, the on-call engineer, stared at her screen, coffee cold in her hand. The server ran the company’s primary document archive. No backup had completed successfully in three weeks. No one had told her.

She tried a graceful unmount. umount /var/archive hung forever. A soft reboot did nothing but land her in an emergency shell. The filesystem was in a critical state. CentOS 7’s default filesystem, XFS, was known for its robustness, but when it broke, it broke with a vengeance.