r-linux
Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2009 5:10 am
We have a ext3 disk (160GBytes) which was accidently repartitioned to 128GBytes and formatted to fat32 and used for a day with about 2GBytes written to it.
I download r-linux to see if we could recover data which had not been overwritten.
If I do the following:-
Reset the partition to 160GBytes using fdisk.
Use fsck to restore a valid superblock from one of the uncorrupted alternatives but not allow fsck to "fix" anything else.
Scan disk with r-linux
Select recover all file
We get back about half of our data which consists of a number of directories, each with 3 text file and a folder with many jpg files.
The other data on the disk is similar, consisting of directories with 1 text file and a folder with many ras files (sun raster files).
Can you think of any reason we get one type of data back rather than the other?
Clearly the early part of the disk was overwritten which means the inodes metadata (and the data!) for the initial disk groups has been lost. However r-linux has successfully located inodes for the directory fragments remaining in the uncorrupted disk groups for the jpg data. What could be causing the ras directory stubs to be missed?
If I don't repartition the disk back to 160GBytes and restore the superblock, r-linux works quite differently and does no restore any linux directory fragments. The presents of the valid fat32 data seems to make it operate quite differently.
R-linux has easily the best of any of the software in the ext2/3 disk recovery area we have tried!
Any comments you have would be much appreciated.
I download r-linux to see if we could recover data which had not been overwritten.
If I do the following:-
Reset the partition to 160GBytes using fdisk.
Use fsck to restore a valid superblock from one of the uncorrupted alternatives but not allow fsck to "fix" anything else.
Scan disk with r-linux
Select recover all file
We get back about half of our data which consists of a number of directories, each with 3 text file and a folder with many jpg files.
The other data on the disk is similar, consisting of directories with 1 text file and a folder with many ras files (sun raster files).
Can you think of any reason we get one type of data back rather than the other?
Clearly the early part of the disk was overwritten which means the inodes metadata (and the data!) for the initial disk groups has been lost. However r-linux has successfully located inodes for the directory fragments remaining in the uncorrupted disk groups for the jpg data. What could be causing the ras directory stubs to be missed?
If I don't repartition the disk back to 160GBytes and restore the superblock, r-linux works quite differently and does no restore any linux directory fragments. The presents of the valid fat32 data seems to make it operate quite differently.
R-linux has easily the best of any of the software in the ext2/3 disk recovery area we have tried!
Any comments you have would be much appreciated.