Recover Partition??? HELP!!!!

villusion · 08-10-2005, 01:13 AM

Please, I hope someone can help. I was creating a new swap system, but accidentally typed the wrong partition!! AHhhh, it just so happens, it was my /dev/hda2 partition, and had ALL my webserver files on..... and of course being the idiot I am, I never created a backup!!

I did try and download r-linux, and recover a bunch of files, but not in the actual ext2fs format. The program runs on windows, and created a bunch of file starting with $Inode####. Does anyone know how to restore these back on to my linux box running red-hat 9.0.

If you open one of the files up in notepad, it's like the file contains a whole bunch of the recovered files, you can see the filename, and then gibberish!

Sample filelist

Sample $inode file 1

Sample $inode file 2

(VERY DESPERATE)
-David
villusion@new.rr.com

Half_Elf · 08-10-2005, 11:07 AM

What's your filesystem? Recovering in Linux is very hard, the application you've tried probably read from the first sector to the last, putting everything it read together...

Ext2/ext3 may be possible to recover, reiserfs/xfs are almost impossible I heard.

villusion · 08-10-2005, 11:49 AM

The filesystem was ext2, then when I was trying to create a new swap drive, I had created it on the wrong mount. I'm pretty much a newbie at linux, so the next thing I did was to use the mkfs command, and put it back to ext2.

I've tried testdisk, but that's a little confusing. Right now I have the drive in a windows machine, and I'm running this Quick Recovery program on it right now, we'll see what that does.

What else can I do??? ahhh

Half_Elf · 08-10-2005, 12:13 PM

I found an howto about a tool there :
http://e2undel.sourceforge.net/recovery-howto.html

You might find this useful... is your linux partition is still bootable?

villusion · 08-10-2005, 12:56 PM

Thanks, I'll give that a try next. No it's not bootable, all the files are gone... but I haven't done anything destructive to it yet, so if I could just get a recovery program to work....

Thanks for your help!

Brrro · 10-11-2005, 04:05 PM

Well,

You can try <......> . This is really great tool with awesome methods. Recommended! <....URL....>

Electro · 10-11-2005, 04:33 PM

If you deleted a partition and created two more, you can fix the partition table by using fdisk or cfdisk as many times you want. If you formated the new swap partition, then only partial of the data will be saved. Its easier to save text files instead of binary files.

The best way to try to restore the files, is to get another hard drive and make an image file of the bad partition. Do not run fsck or any filesystem tools. A utility dd is great for this. After dd is done, you can use grep and other text tools to find certain keywords in the image file. Recovering binary files is hard if you do not know the file format structure of every type. A hex editor can not be use because it takes too long. A program have to be made to do this.

I do not know enough to restore files. I have not yet practice editing files with a hex editor. I only know that you can re-creatre partitions forever without screwing up the files.

Half_Elf · 10-11-2005, 04:34 PM

Quote:

From that useless recuperation tool website :

Supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5 file systems
Supports MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP partitions

This will probably be incredibly useful to recover a LINUX partition formatted with EXT2.

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