Crashed filesystem - directory recovery

[Luigi Fabio]

On 22 Feb 2004 at 12:20, Bodo Thiesen wrote:
> If you already answered 'yes', than you have to recopy the image from the 
> broken hard disk again, because saying 'yes' simply means to delete the 
> inode. On the other hand: If the inodes management areas are in broken 
> blocks, than they cannot be rescued at all. How important are the files? 
> (There are companies, which are specialised on data rescue, which are 
> able to do things, which you cannot - but it's expensive as everything 
> needs to be done by hand ;-)
Yes, I realise. I did copy the image again from a backup - several 
times - but I didn't get very far. I answered no and told fsck to fix 
the filetype instead when it asked me, but I only was able to recover 
one file from the arch dir - one much too old to be of interest (as a 
matter of fact, fsck did not stop when I answered no, I recalled 
correctly). At this point, any ideas are welcome - both for recovery 
of this filesystem and as a choice for future filesystems, because 
ext3 has shown itself to be far too brittle for critical usage.
To answer your last question - I asked a data recovery place, in the 
hopes that they can mount the platters on a working head/spindle 
system to retrieve the data that I could not, but I am still waiting 
for an estimate. Per past experiences, unless they can gain data that 
way, data recovery places are much *less* effective than in house 
solutions, because they can't even remotely afford to dedicate the 
amount of time that we do in house to the problem while keeping their 
bills acceptable.

> Regards, Bodo

Regards,
Luigi Fabio - lfabio at smiling-web.com