journaling - lost of information
 

hi guys,
i am losting information in my destop fc9 and i would appreciate some help from you.

what happenend was as follows:

1. i installed an old HD IDE, which was formmated as ext3
2. fc9 didnt recognize it properly an d when booting it falls into a "grub" promp
3. i observed that it was trying to boot from a wrong partition, so i execute root and setup grub commands in order to select the boot partition
4. fc9 tried to boot, but anyway asked again for the partition which i reconfirmed in booting time.
5. Finally it started and after de login, it warned about the system date. I got a warning message to change the system date in order not to have problems
6. I updated the system hour and date and started doing some process over the new disk (the 3rd HD). The process was a copy of a big directory (cp -frvu ..) from 2ndHD to 3rdHD (a backup). Thr 3rdHD was growing a lot so i decide to stop the copy process, to remove the 3rdHD an to restart the copy.

7 at that moment i saw that the big directory in the 2nd disk had the information as it was 15 days ago.

so i wonder what was going on,
a journaling problem ?
considering that i have not modified my 2ndHD, does exist a possible recovery process?

my file system is a VolGroup00.

thanks in advance
hector

For me this OP leaves too much to speculate about. It isn't that clear. That may well be my fault since I prefer unambiguous tool (like 'dmsetup', 'fdisk', 'dmesg') and system log output over arbitrary descriptions of disks, partitions and actions...

If you have a disk you do not want to alter then you should not let the system mount it on boot because ext3 filesystems contain a journal that will be replayed when necessary by the kernel before mounting it. One way would be to use a Live or rescue CD that won't automount partitions and avoid replaying the journal by mounting partitions read-only and as ext2 because ext3 basically is an improved ext2 plus a journal. So your statement of not having modified the disks contents isn't backed by evidence as far as I can see from your OP. I don't know what disk you booted from but reconfiguring the system date may have repercussions. For instance I don't know how the kernel would behave when encountering journal entries ahead of time (replay or skip?). If time reconfiguration lead to removing journal entries instead of replaying them then those changes might well be lost. Try booting a Live CD, then mounting the partitions manually, read-only and as ext2 and tell us if file timestamps changed or not.

hi guys,
i have found out that my new disk (3rd) was working as it was the 2nd one. This is very unusual but when i removed the information from the 3rd one (after the copy from 2nd to 3rd), information was also removed in the 2nd hard disk :-(

i also unmount and physically disconnected the new disk (3rd) and i continued getting acces to a directoru of the 2nd disk ...

i really dont understand what happened but it was like a kind of mirror.

i finnally installed fc10.

thanks for comments

hector