[nflug] attempting data recovery (after total screwup)

[paul costa]

Stephen Burke wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I guess maybe this might be a lesson in NOT doing things before being 
> fully awake, but I screwed things up majorly here this morning and I'm 
> not quite sure if I can recover or not.
>
> I have this machine with 2 200G drives in it. The first, with the 
> system on it is the removable variety and the second was for dumping 
> data onto that I wanted to be able to use from whichever system was 
> running on the first. (mostly ext3 and some fat32 and ext3 -since the 
> main system here is dualbooted 'nix and xp -with a swap area in the 
> middle)
>
> Since I had a free drive to pop ino the first hd slot, I thought I 
> would attempt to install slackware 11 on it since I haven't yet really 
> dabbled in the slack realm.
>
> SO, after using fdisk to set up new partitions on the slack disk, I 
> started merrily running through the install options, thinking that 
> since I had just set up /dev/hda in fdisk that that's where slack 
> would assume it was supposed to go. So I hit "ok", not reading closely 
> enough to see that it was asking to format hdb3 instead of hda3.
>
> I noticed after a couple of seconds that it was hitting hdb and killed 
> it, but not, apparently, before it deleted the journal (was ext3) and 
> presumably quite a bit of other crucial information.
>
> Then, trying to recover things, I booted up the main OS here which 
> naturally started complaining when it hit that data partition. So I 
> ran fsck there, which of course complained even more when everything 
> was out of whack. That was followed by all sorts of clearing of broken 
> inodes and fixing of stuff, which I answered yes to all of, hoping 
> that things might be put straight by that. There was alot of talk  of 
> moving things to "lost+found" during that where once again I hit <y> 
> for everything, once again, full of futile hope.
>
> Everything boots fine, now, but when I look at that partition I see 
> absolutely nothing. and when I look at the properties window I see 
> "5.4 GB out of 9.8 GB (46% used)" when actually the partition should 
> be 121.5 GB.
>
> My question now is: since I killed the format before it went too far, 
> is there any hope of recovering any of the data that WAS there, or did 
> I screw it up further by letting fsck "fix" and "clear" everything?
>
> Any particular data recovery tools that I might look into, or is now a 
> "fait accompli" and I just have to resign myself to paying the price 
> for being a bonehead?
>
> Any advice at all is most welcome at this point, if only how to 
> recover the 100+ GB of new space where I might put other stuff.
>
> Thanks,
> S.
>
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>
that sucks,
I did similar thing once, but I was lucky enough that I backed up my sys 
to another drive before I ruined it
have you tried installing the drive in another machine as a slave or 
external usb drive, mount it and see if you get lucky ?
I don't have any software solutions for data recovery off the top of my 
head but I remember an FBI agent giving a demo of data recovery tools at 
school that he said you can download for a try. It was some type of 
forensic data recovery software. You could probably find some info on 
google

peace

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