OK, so I've been an idiot and tried to resize an ext4 partition without fscking or backing it up first and now I'm paying the price.

The scenario is this. I was trying to reinstall Xubuntu and, as part of the process, resize my /home partition - a logical, ext4 partition - using SystemRescueCD-X86-3.3.0 / gparted. I wanted to grow both the partition itself and the 'containing' partition by 20GB by extending it 'down'. The process went to about 85% and then failed with an I/O error. The partition is now unmountable and un-fsck-able (surprise!)

I've tried dd'ing it over to a stand alone hard drive, but that also fails with an I/O error. safecopy --stage 3 claims to recover all but about 150,000 bytes.

Is there any chance of recovering the data from this partition, or do I just kick myself - hard, and repeatedly - and chalk it up to experience?

Many thanks,

David Shaw

To make an image of the partition use ddrescue instead of dd, it is specifically designed to handle errors on disks. After that you can try to recover your files.

See what testdisk says too.

Apologies for taking so long to respond - personal issues, I'm afraid :-(

Well, testdisk didn't say much. Just went into a never ending loop saying that it the partition but couldn't find anything on it, doing a deep scan and returning back to the start.

ddrescue seemed to do a better job than safecopy, but the result is pretty much garbage. I've used photorec to recover some files, but it's a pretty small percentage of what was on there, so I guess it's a case of lesson learned.

In other news, one of my NT formatted portable drives also went bad on me this week, losing my entire music library. This <expletive deleted> computer has it in for me ;-)

Ho hum.

Anyway, many thanks for the help,

David Shaw

Now that you have to cases of "data lost" you should think about backup strategies to prevent such things in the future.