Hi all,

I'm in a pretty messed-up situation, hope you can give me a hand.
I deleted by accident a folder containing a VMware server virtual machine, that contains most critical information. The host OS is CentOS 5.5, which I believe by default uses Ext3.

I shut down the PC intermediately after noticing this.
Is there any chance of recovering the files? Would they be able to mount to the same or another virtual machine?

I need to get this information somehow, there are no backups.

Which software can I use?

If anyone can help me recover this, you'll get a free book by amazon, you have my word.
I'm THAT desperate.

Hello and Welcome to LinuxQuestions,

I understand you're desperate but posting in multiple forums will not get you a solution faster but instead you (and we) might loose focus on the conversation, not knowing where answers are being posted. Please stick with one thread per problem/question. Reporting as duplicate.

Kind regards,

Eric

If your data is really important, you should do backup at first, before you try to recover anything.

Don't start your os, use livecd instead.

- If you have free hard disk same size or bigger, you can use dd to clone disk.
- Otherwise you should dd your disk to image file.


It is important to use sector to sector copy as dd, so you can backup deleted files also.

After backup, there is several tools to try. Ext3 is difficult to recover i know.

for example:
http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/
<moderator edit: URL removed/>

-Kane

First, make a backup copy, as already suggested. After that, you can use photorec from the testdisk package to try to get your files back, of course from a live-medium. It would at least help to get the disk-image of the VM back, so that you can use it in another VM to recover your data.

In future I would recommend to get a good backup plan for important data.

if you deleted your data from the folder then boot into RIPLinux and use photorec software.

if it can't restore it then you lost all data. if it restores correctly you will get your VM back and running fast. i think you first need to release it from the vm before using it again...