(I'm not sure whether this should be here, in the Linux general forum, or one of the software forums, but this seems closest to what I want.) I had a disk (200GB Seagate with a single ext3 partition on it) fail. I don't know why it failed, but I don't think it was a hardware problem. I ran fsck on it; it found a lot of orphan files and dirs (about 9000 total, 6800 dirs.) I'm working my way through these to find out what they were and where to put them. I have established that a number of files and directories have been lost. I'm copying files and data to a new HDD, so any data on the old disk won't be lost (in theory.)

I've run debugfs to try to find the missing data; the names of the objects are in the appropriate place in the appropriate directory, but the inode reference is 0. (A sub-question: between the inode and the filename is a number in parenthesis. What is this number? eg:
11338089 (28) picture.jpg
^inode.......^??? ^filename
It doesn't seem to correspond to anything I can find. stat <11338089> doesn't mention it at all.)

Does anyone know of a way I can recover the inodes of the missing files and dirs? I suspect that some of it is irrecoverable, because I now have a lot of block and character devices and pipes with random numbers for owner and group, Jan. 1 1970 creation/modification dates, and random permissions, which implies that the filetype marker in the inode has been changed. I would like to try to recover this stuff, though (or at least as much as I can.)

I'm running kernel version 2.4.20 with xfs patches; it was originally a redhat 7.2 system, but I've changed almost everything. It's on a dual-processor 500MHz celeron box.

Thanks in advance
Wocky

Have you looked into [url=http://foremost.sourceforge.net/]foremost[/url}. It may be helpful in recovering your files. Good luck with it

Thanks, J.W. I was able to recover some files (including some I didn't know I had, oddly enough) but some seem to have gone forever.

If anyone else is interested, I went through the source for debugfs to find out what this number is. It appears to be the length of this directory entry: dirent->rec_len. In any directory, the number is about 16-32 for all but the last entry, which is always large, often several hundred.