Hi there,

I've archived my home directory accidentally by the following command on Ubuntu 12.10:

All of a sudden, my desktop environment disappeared and I was unable to type on the terminal.

After restart, I'm getting the error:

Here's my paste from Boot-Repair tool executed by means of LiveCD:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/1467300/

My question is - where should I type the opposite command for extracting?

Assuming it'll fix my problem...

You specified '/dev/sda1/home' as the output file for tar. (The -f option.)

Since you didn't specify any input, tar would've (I think) defaulted to 'stdin', which in this case would have been whatever you kept typing.

The command line didn't return to a prompt, I'm assuming; it just let you keep typing?

Unfortunately, in this case, everything that was on your /dev/sda1 partition is probably gone for good. The entirety of the data on it would've been overwritten from the first bit by a gzipped tar "file" named 'home', hence the "unknown file system" errors.

It sounds like you have filesystem corruption, a tar is not going to remove your existing content. At this point I would run an fsck and see if it resolves your issues, this could have been caused with tar trying to archive file locks and corrupting file meta data. A quick fsck will probably correct this.

---------- Post added 12-26-12 at 10:06 AM ----------

Check out http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-b...x-rescue-mode/

That command should have just resulted in an error message, "/dev/sda1/home: Cannot open: Not a directory", and done no damage. If what you really did was (with a space preceding "/home") then you have thoroughly destroyed whatever filesystem was on sda1 and overwritten it with a gzipped archive of /home. If that command ran to completion without error, then you probably do have a complete archive of /home.

What to do next depends on what was previously on the partition /dev/sda1. From the name and the GRUB error you get when booting, I suspect that was your root partition. If so, you will need to reinstall the system. Fortunately, you have the previous contents of /home, but you will need to save that on separate media (perhaps a USB flash drive) and restore it after the reinstall. If, from the LiveCD, you have the flash drive mounted on /mnt/tmp, then you can save that archive like this:I suggest doing it that way because there is no easy way to find the size of that gzipped archive, and there is almost certainly no need to copy the entire /dev/sda1 partition. That gunzip command should terminate with the message, "gzip: /dev/sda1: decompression OK, trailing garbage ignored". If it happens that your flash drive is too small to hold the uncompressed image, then you could try recompressing it again:Either way, you will now have the previous content of /home, which you can restore after the reinstall.

1 members found this post helpful.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

By writing to the /dev/sda1 you have overwritten the file system. There is no undoing your mistake. Your only choices are to restore from a known good backup if that exists or to reinstall.

How was the drive partitioned? I assume that /sda1 is your / partition due to the description of events. What is /sda2? Is it /home or a data drive etc. If necessary there are tools that can help you recover data like photorec and testdisk.

Was that the exact command used?

The command:

Should not have done any damage, unless there is more to the command that the OP left out I don't think the sda1 partition is blown. I just ran the command on a centos vm for giggles and it did not do any damage. There is some info being left out here or its just a simple file system corruption and an fsck should fix it.

Also, remember that you cant hit folders directly from the drive path... /dev/sda1/etc/ is not a valid path just like /dev/sda1/home is not a valid path. Linux sees /dev/sda1 as a special block file. Linux reads and treats everything as a file including hardware and drives.

You're right of course rknichols, I've typed:

Correct, it was my root partition. I've reinstalled the system and restored my /home folder. Now everything's fine. Thanks for your explanations guys.

Regards.