[CS-FSLUG] Ext2 recovery: a study in desperation

[Tim Young]

Hi there,
Not sure if I am in-time enough, but...
If it is just your partition table that is messed up, then you do not need an ext2 specific recovery tool.  There
are a number of tools that can recreate a partition table.

The first thing you want to do, if possible, is make a raw backup of your disk.  If you can do something like
this from Linux:
    dd if=[device with dud HD] of=/mnt/goodhd/file
example:
    dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/tmp/diskbackup
This usually can make a raw backup of the whole drive.

Once you have a backup of the drive, you can do all sorts of fun experiments and "recover" from something going
wrong.

If you know how you originally partitioned the HD, you can actually repartition it with fdisk.  fdisk writes the
partition table out without messing up any of the data portions of the HD.  So if you partition it exactly as it
was partitioned previously, you will suddenly see everything you had before.

Off the top of my head, I do not remember any partition tools for you.  But here is a link to a rescue disk that
has testdisk:  http://trinityhome.org/trk/  Testdisk is a tool for recovering partitions.

Hope this helps.

    - Tim Young

keltik at nycap.rr.com wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anyone knows of or has experience with any simple-to-use ext2 recovery tools.  I don't
> know what happened, but a couple of days ago my server's hard drive decided not to boot (Grub error 17).
> Apparently the partition table is now unreadable, and I'm not sure what shape my data is in.  It was a Fedora
> Core 3 system, FWIW.
>
> I have the sickly drive now hooked up to a machine that has both Windows 98 and SUSE 9.2, so I could use a
> recovery program that works on either OS.  On Linux, I tried e2salvage, but that didn't compile; I also tried
> e2retrieve, but I guess I don't understand how it works.
>
> Thanks for any help,
>
> Kathy "I backed up everything EXCEPT..." Montgomery
>
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