Overwriting ext2 Partition with ext3

[evilninja]

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Niki Hammler schrieb:
> mke2fs -j /device
>
> Important is the "-j" switch.
>
> What happens without the "-j" switch? All superblocks and inodes
> are overwritten. Is this true??

i don't think, that all inodes are overwritten. mkfs.?fs is pretty fast,
so it's creating the superblock and the journal (-j) only.

> However, can you tell me if it is theoretically possible to recover data
> maybe even with meta info (file name)?
> Then I would give my harddrive to a professional recover company.

we had a case here, where *something* has corrupted our shiny RAID-5
ext3fs. also we felt safe having a RAID-5, a fsck has moved a lot to
lost+found, leaving nothing in the normal dir-tree. we were still
missing a lot important files. we then tried several ext2/ext3 recovery
tools (e2undel, recover, playing with debugfs), but all seem to fail. we
happend to have a windoze machine around and we had some more luck with
a tool called "R-Linux":

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml

and despite the usual "it's impossible to recover data from ext3" we
were able to recover a lot of files, that didn't make it to lost+found.

Christian.
- --
BOFH excuse #405:

Sysadmins unavailable because they are in a meeting talking about why
they are unavailable so much.

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