[H-GEN] degrees of filesystem sickness?

[Martin Pool]

>On Tue, 9 Jun 1998, Martin Pool wrote:
>
>> OK: If you have a hardcopy of how the partition table was configured on the
>> disk, then you can just run fdisk, enter the _exact_ same start and 
>> end cylinders, and your partition table will be rewritten and all
>> the partitions should be readable.  You can go from there to using
>> debugfs or fsck on your partitions.
>
>That works in pribcipal.  And it works in practice too unless something
>has written across a parttiion boundary or the like.  I tend to keep
>hardcopies of the partition table around for just such an emergency.

I've recovered a screwed up partition table that way: I was pretty 
proud of it.  A few other blocks were lost, but if you can at least 
get the partition table working fsck will recover most of the data
that's not physically gone.

A session with debugfs (in readonly mode :) can be very educational.

Actually, I think both ext2fs and FAT will cope if the partition is 
too long, as long as it starts in the right spot.  (Of course, you'll
lost whatever's on the next partition).  Furthermore, they both
have recognisable magic numbers at the start, so with a little 
persistence you might be able to work out where the partitions were 
meant to be.

--
Martin Pool

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
        of different places, just write a Unix operating system.
                                -- Linus Torvalds



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