URGENT: How to recover ext3 files?

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 09:56, kapil.sampath at wipro.com wrote:

> After panic boot, I have executed fsck for the mount point and we
> couldn’t find a single file. We have lot of directories under
> lost+found  like this #3194985.

> Can anyone tell me how to recover the data from this folder? This is
> urgent.

It sounds like the root directory of your filesystem was lost.  What
happens then is that a new root and /lost+found directory will be
created, and all inodes in the system which could be found will have
been relinked into the new /lost+found.

So you'll have lost the names of a lot of files, but their contents may
still be intact.  And as long as the subdirectories under / were not
lost, they will also still be intact, so any files beneath them will
still have the correct filenames, in subdirs of /lost+found.

Basically you'll just have to go through the files and directories in
/lost+found renaming them back to their correct filenames.  That will
involve manually examining their contents to work out where in the
recreated root directory to rename them to.

Cheers,
 Stephen