I 'accidentaly' deleted my home partition when installing SuSE10.1. Please don't ask why, it was morning... I had a headeache after many stella artoise... so I ignored the red bold letters with the exclamation marks that suse said to me it was going to delete my partition...

I googled through many programs around the web that can recover data with licences that reach the cost of $450 to find out that I already have the program that can help me

I run and from a live distro and from a SLED10 on a different partition reiserfsck

#reiserfsck -S --rebuild-tree /dev/sda3 (where my ex 250gb home folder existed)

It starts saying that it will check 69065440, but it stops halfway. No disk activity, nothing.


Just stares me in the eyes, saying to me again and again how m....n I am

If there is anyone with more experience on this and can help me, I would be grateful

250 GB takes a long time to rebuild the tree. Also if you do not finish the rebuild, the disk will not be mountable and will give a superblock error. My rebuild took 4 hours. Sometimes it looks like it was stalled, but it was not. Try another live cd such as knoppix. Also if this is a boot drive, you may loose the ability to log in (that's what happened to me) so copy those files when you find them.

Doesn't sound like anything was deleted if you can run a fs check on it.
Deleting a partition does not delete any data. So long as you don't allocate another partition on the same space and write to it, the data is still there - as evidenced by the check.

If the partition occupied the whole disk just use [c]fdisk to reallocate it - and off you go. Else make a guess as to size.
So long as you get the start correct and at least as big as it was, you can't do any damage.
Else have a look at testdisk; does all the work for you - is shipped on Knoppix.

I am in perfect agreement with syg00. If all that you did was deleting the partition the, all that happened there was - the entry for the partition you deleted was removed from the partition table !! Your data, superblock.. blah.. blah... was all sitting there untouched !! All you had to do was recreate the partition and blam ! Your /home partition is back with all the data that was there in it, intact !!

Now, you have put in unnecessary trouble. Guess, you'll have to complete rebuilding the tree before you try anything.

Since rebuilding the tree renders the partition and drive useless (superblock errors) by design, yes you need to finish rebuilding the tree before anything else.

Thanks for all the replies

The problem is that I didn't delete the partition only but formatted it also(with the same fs) and also wrote another 5gb on it.

I stopped reiserfsck once when it stalled with knoppix. But when I tried it from SLED I let it for more than 1 hour and...
as usaf_sp said above it gave me an error about a bad block at a certain address.
It consulted me to try write data on it(I don't know how) make a backup and buy a new one because bad blocks multiple.

Is there a way to jump over the 'bad' block in this process? I could find anything at the man page about it.

Actually, I believe that after my mistake stopping the reiserfsck in the middle it's an unreversable process...is that right?

Restart reiserfsck because it will render your drive useless unless you repartition and reformat. Wait, the size of the drive will take a long time and might appear to hang, but it is still working.

What you are doing is rebuilding the tree, meaning it is reconstructing the drive, stopping it in the middle causes the drive to not be useful.