Lost a hard drive!? Help.

[Jim Herrmann]

I got it back!  My files are all there!  I think it was the Midnight Commander 
that took care of it.  I used it's undelete feature, but it just kept running 
and running, until I finally killed the task.  I watched it count up to 2 
billion inodes, then it rolled over to -2billion and kept counting up.  
Pretty strange.  But I couldn't break out of it.  So, I killed the pid.  When 
I ran fsck as a part of the recover process, it said that there were no 
deleted inodes, so I thought I was screwed.  Like a dummy, I didn't even 
check the directory.  Later on I happened to pull up eroaster, and it had a 
directory on the data partition as a default, and there were files there.  
Whoo Whoo!  My data was magically restored.  You know, they say that any 
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  :-)

I'm guessing that the failure was because this partition is mounted outside 
the standard paths, /, /USR, /HOME, etc. that Mandrake did not, by default, 
run fsck on the partition.  There was a question at boot up time, after the 
crash, about running a full system check but it timed out and went on before 
I could reply.  Once I ran the undelete, it found and recataloged the inodes 
in the vtoc (not sure if I'm using the right terms here, falling back on my 
mainframe terms) and viola, I had files.  Still don't know why recover had a 
problem with the partition, but MC worked for me.

Thanks for everyone's input.  I learned a great deal from this experience.

Peace,
Jim

On Wednesday 30 October 2002 06:02 pm, Steven Elling wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 October 2002 00:16, Jim Herrmann wrote:
> > I tried to install recover, but it doesn't seem to like ext3 partitions.
> > I think it's looking for ext2 exclusively.  Anyone know how to get it to
> > do ext3?  I also found a file undelete in Midnight Commander.  I'm trying
> > that now.  It's taking a really long time.  I'll let you know how that
> > comes out.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jim
>
> An ext3 partition is just ext2 with journaling added on top.  I don't see
> why it would complain, unless, it doesn't know that ext3 is the same as
> ext2 under the hood.
>
> Try and mount the partition as ext2 and see if recover will work then.