I do have an identical spare drive but how can I make an exact copy of a drive with a messed up file system and also, how can I be sure that the copy is non-destructive? If I can do this, it'd be wonderful! Madison PS - I got a dd of th last tape that ran (finally) and it is about 3.6GB (about right). I extracted it as a tar.gz (which should work) but it fails claiming to not be a gzip archive... Any ideas on that front by chance?

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Hi Madison,

First, if you have a spare hard drive, make a copy of the data on the bad disk (or better yet two) in case the hardware will die, and work on the copy.

Then do:

# /sbin/mke2fs -n /dev/hda5 -b [blocksize] Be sure to use the right block size here!

You will see output including:

Superblock backups stored on blocks: 8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729 These are the locations of the superblocks.

Pass these one by one to:

e2fsck -b [backup superblock location] -y /dev/hda5

[read up on "man e2fsck"]

If one of these superblocks are OK, e2fsck will start recovering all possible data (the -y switch means "yes to all"; otherwise you get thousands of prompts).

All the possible files will be dumped into the /lost+found directory. - From there, you should be able to do something like:

find /lost+found/* -name [some directory you are sure of the location of]

i.e. find /long+found/* -name anton allowed me to find my home directory.

the /lost+found directory basicly contains many hard links to the same files.

You should be able to find your /home, /var, /etc, or whatever other directories you have on the drive and move them back to their respective spot.

Be careful - many files may be corrupt without warning.

Using this technique, I was able to recover an ext3 partition after deleting it, resizing the partition, reformatting as reiserfs, and using it for two days. About 70% of the files got recovered, but it obviously depends on the damage done.

Madison Kelly wrote:

...

That would seem to be the case. However, I have used -many- of these Seagates and I have never seen one suddenly pooch before. I am debating running the Seagate test on it or decide to just recommend having it sent to a data recovery house...

I know that backups of the superblock are made, do you know by chance how to locate them and/or how to tell the OS to use one for mounting? Also, at least two partitions on the drive have gone bad...

Madison

- -- Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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