Recovering Data From A Freshly Reformatted Ext3 Partition
 

I recently installed Slackware 9.1, but accidentally instructed it to reformat my /home partition instead of merely mounting it in /etc/fstab. So now, my question is, how would I go about retrieving as much data as possible from it? I've already tried grepping it, which yielded mediocre results, but there must be a better way to get this done. Ideas? Oh, and I only performed a quick format - no checking for bad blocks or anything like that.

Not to be discouraging, but to my knowledge you are probably out of luck. Here's a relevant post from another website:

"Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?

A: Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it: In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks he inode as 'deleted' and leaves the block pointers alone. Your only hope is to 'grep' for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best."

Source: http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/proj.../ext3-faq.html

It may be that the results you got from the grep are as good as it will get. I'd also be interested if there is a way to recover from something like this. As I stated above though, unfortunately to the best of my knowledge the chances of a full recovery are unlikely. Anyone else? -- J.W.