Help needed to recover data from ext3 file system where mkfs was issued accidentally

Damian Menscher menscher at uiuc.edu
Sun Apr 24 15:21:17 UTC 2005


[Disclaimer: I'm NOT an expert, and what I say might not be the best 
method.]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 kapil.sampath at wipro.com wrote:

> I connected my harddisk which had ext3 filesystem and some files
> archived in it as slave device and issued "mkfs /dev/hdb2" accidentally.
> Immediately I issued Ctrl C and stopped the process. But before that it
> had deleted some 100 Blocks.

Ouch.  :(

Before you do anything that will write to the drive, it might be a good 
idea to make a bitwise backup of the entire disk using dd.  That way, if 
something screws it up worse, you can fall back to your current 
situation.

> I am even unable to connect it as a slave device and mount it. The mount
> is saying bad super block information.

Have you tried using alternate superblocks?  Maybe one of the later ones 
hasn't been corrupted?  Of course, you'd want to fsck using one of the 
later superblocks.

> Please tell me how can I recover my data.

Assuming a fsck doesn't work, you're mostly screwed.  You might try 
getting The Coroner's Toolkit, available from porcupine.org or fish.com. 
But expect to spend a LOT of time.  It's unlikely your data is worth the 
effort.

> This disk is containing important data.

Oh, that makes it easier.... since all important data is backed up.  ;)

Damian Menscher
-- 
-=#| Physics Grad Student & SysAdmin @ U Illinois Urbana-Champaign |#=-
-=#| 488 LLP, 1110 W. Green St, Urbana, IL 61801 Ofc:(217)333-0038 |#=-
-=#| 4602 Beckman, VMIL/MS, Imaging Technology Group:(217)244-3074 |#=-
-=#| <menscher at uiuc.edu> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Fax:(217)333-9819 |#=-
-=#| The above opinions are not necessarily those of my employers. |#=-




More information about the Ext3-users mailing list