Data written to unformatted disk
 

Whota clot I am. I went and fdisk'd a USB disk and put the Fat32 filesystem onto it. Then I thought I ran dosfsck over it which I thort formatted the disk - apparently not. Then I copied a bunch of files and directories to it. Now I am unable to recover the files and data. In the rare instances when I perform a sloppy mount I see directories named 001, 002, 003 and 004. These directories variously contain files named 001, 002, 004 (no 003) etc.

Fdisk gives me:

prompt>fdisk /dev/sdl
Disk /dev/sdl: 3909 MB, 3909091328 bytes
121 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1017 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7502 * 512 = 3841024 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdl1 1 1017 3814736 b W95 FAT32

prompt>fdisk /dev/sdl1
Disk /dev/sdl1: 3906 MB, 3906289664 bytes
121 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1016 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7502 * 512 = 3841024 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1219b459

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

prompt>parted -l
Model: USB DISK 2.0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdl: 3909MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 31.7kB 3906MB 3906MB primary

prompt>mount -s -t vfat /dev/sdl1 /mnt/here
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdl1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


I don't know enough to use dd, kpartx, parted, partmon, partprobe, partx et al

prompt>dmesg
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl1.
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl1.
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl1.
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl1.
FAT: invalid media value (0xb9)
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl.
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdl1.
usb 2-4: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 12
usb 2-4: not running at top speed; connect to a high speed hub
usb 2-4: New USB device found, idVendor=13fe, idProduct=3600
usb 2-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-4: Product: USB DISK 2.0
usb 2-4: Manufacturer:
usb 2-4: SerialNumber: 07AA0D027E440097
usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi10 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 12
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access USB DISK 2.0 PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg13 type 0
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdl] 7634944 512-byte logical blocks: (3.90 GB/3.64 GiB)
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdl] Write Protect is off
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdl] Mode Sense: 03 41 00 00
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdl] Assuming drive cache: write through
usb-storage: device scan complete
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdl] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdl:

Hopefully the above provides sufficient for someone more proficient to address the issue and suggest how to try and recover the data on the unformatted disk. Be aware it's practically impossible now to mount the disk.

Oh brother, I'm sooo stupid. I hope you can help me.

:-( Peter

Depending on the file types, you might just try running photorec (part of the testdisk suite) on the drive and see what comes back. You usually lose the file names, but it's better than nothing.

Also, take a dd image of the drive if you have space, and do all your operations on that.