[nflug] attempting data recovery (after total screwup)

[matt donovan]

you can always grab Helix live cd and try that you might be bale to get
everything you need since it's full of tools for this type of thing.

On 4/18/07, paul costa <paul at paulcosta.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nflug mailing list
> > nflug at nflug.org
> > http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug
> >
> 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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>
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