[ale] Again with the filesystem recovery SOLUTION?

[ChangingLINKS.com]

I may have found an easier way (by accident). 

As a follow-up:
The other day, I was installing Red 8.0 on a Maxtor drive, and the 
circumstances cost me loss of data on a slave drive. After all of our 
discussions about ext3, I brought up the topic and the "local ALE" meeting 
here in Austin last week. One guy mentioned that he had done the data 
recovery for ext3. Moreover, he said that ext3 gives a false sense of 
security because the journal can "go bad" and make it difficult to get the 
data back without losing the data. He said that ext3 is NOT a good 
journalling filesystem, and that his computers run on something called 
"xfs(?)" He went on to repeat that ext3 just has journaling and if you don't 
NEED that, it is probably better to stick with ext2.

With that lesson, and my own experiences - I have declared ext3 "worthless."  
Until they get a better undelete AND I learn to backup the journal, I will 
only be using ext2 filesystems - which solves my undelete problem.
<Drew spits in the direction of ext3>

THE SOLUTION:
The installation process somehow caused the slave drive to be corrupted. I 
believe it may have been due to me specifying a different name for it, and 
indicating that it was ext2.
When I booted the computer with the original drive (not the Maxtor), the 
installation hung until I . . .

went through a normal fsck /dev/hdc and said "y" to everything.

When I logged in, the filesystem would not automatically mount with fstab.
I mounted manually, and did not specify file type.
I saw many of my files in "lost+found" directory on the drive.

||: To get the drive to mount with fstab, I had to change the filesystem 
specification to ext2!! I do not believe that the filesystem was reformated - 
but :||

Anyway, I was able to recover much of the data (using "Worker" to help with 
the tedious process of renaming files).

So apparently there is a way to convert the ext3 back to ext2 (either by 
renaming the filesystem and claiming that it is ext2 - which I believe was my 
"mistake") or by reformatting ext2 and recovering the data from there!

-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy, and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com



On Monday 27 January 2003 13:29, Geoffrey wrote:
> D. Alan Stewart wrote:
> > It's been a long time, but my memory is that deleted files could be
> > recovered on the Vax operating system. I would bet that most mainframe
> > operating systems had some type protections against accidental file
> > deletion. Of course DOS had undelete and the Mac has had the trashcan
> > since day one. *nix operating systems are the only ones I am personally
> > familiar with (which isn't saying much) where deleting a file is a
> > single, unrecoverable step.
>
> I'm afraid that is inaccurate.  There are various tools that permit the
> retrieval of deleted files on UNIX boxes.  The primary example which has
> caused the most stir on the list is with deleting files on an ext3
> partition.  Apparently there is no easy way to retrieve a file in this
> situation.
>
> > Joe wrote:
> >>> From <http://www.simdesk.com>:
> >>
> >> "Several patents have been filed for SimExplorer, including
> >> a recycle bin available on the Internet. SimExplorer moves
> >> deleted data to a virtual recycle bin and allows users to
> >> recover or restore that data if it was deleted by mistake.
> >> Previously, this functionality was only available on
> >> MicroSoft(r) platforms; SimExplorer now makes it possible
> >> on all computer platforms."
> >>
> >> I don't know whether to be frightened or amused.
> >>
> >> -- Joe Knapka
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Ale mailing list
> >> Ale at ale.org
> >> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale


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