(Hmmm ... it doesn't seem like Linux - General is the right place for this, but I don't see a better one. Suggestions welcome.)
Okay, so, a few months ago an install-gone-wrong completely trashed both my original disks and my backup disk. If you want the whole gory story,
you can read about it, but at this point I've decided that it probably doesn't matter so much
how it happened. I've come to accept that there is no quick way to fix this. So now I'm moving on to the slow way.
I'm using hexedit and doing simple text searches. I've recovered a few of the most crucial files, and, after having my life consumed by my computer troubles for a while, my computer troubles got consumed by my life, and I'm just now getting back to this issue. Here's my situation: while searching for files, I've occasionally run across a directory. So the directories are there. I've
seen them. And, through various other things I've tried, I feel
moderately confident that the inode table is still around, somehow or another. So there's no reason why I couldn't hack together a script or two and read this puppy all day long. I should
theoretically be able to recover the entire tree, if I can find a directory entry close enough to the root dir.
What I'd like to know is, what are the resources I can take advantage of to reconstruct the tree from the raw bytes of the disk image? I need to know where to find the ext2 directory structure (like a C struct, I mean) and then I should be able to pick out a block that contains a dir, get the filenames, dates, indoes, etc, and then I can look for the next step of figuring out how to turn an inode number into a disk sector.
I know this is doable. I just need a
little help to get started.
