I'm running FC4 with a 250 GB external formatted with ext3. For some reason one day it decided that random folders on the hard disk would just disapper. I didn't actually delete these directories, I was just searching around the drive about a week ago, and noticed that one of my folders was missing, then I navigateds some more and noticed that a few others were gone too.

I've used Stellar Pheonix Linux Data Recovery on it, and so far its recovered most of the files that were in those directories, except for those that were in a specific directory; containing roughly about 90 AVI files. I used debugfs and when I navigated to the respective folder and did an "ls" the last two missing AVI folders appeared. However, when I tried to "cd" into them I was given a "file not found by ext2_lookup" error. I ran "stat" (within debugfs) and all the information for those folders was blanked including the inode number which read 0. I also ran e2fsck and there it found about 25 of those AVIs and put those into the lost+found directory where they were name sequentially with numbers.

So right now, I'm out of ideas and about 65 missing files. So if anybody knows some good methods for recovery, it would greatly be appreciated.

I was thinking about using Foremost (at foremost.sourceforge.net), but I'm not sure how it can recover AVIs because the footers vary from file to file. I've also had trouble just trying to get it too run correctly, has anybody else used this program?

Hello,

You can try foremost : http://foremost.sourceforge.net/
You also can try magicrescue : http://jbj.rapanden.dk/magicrescue/

Those those also work on the file's headers but you may have some luck.
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free_ouyo