[Lvlug] Re: Rescuing hdd data

[Faber Fedor]

On 19/10/05 09:59 -0400, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> I'm not even sure if this is possible, but I figure it's worth it to ask 
> ~ I formatted a drive and realized later that I had some stuff on there 
> that I needed.  It was ext3 before, and I reformatted as ext3.  The 
> stuff I need was piled into the last 10gb of free space on the disk and 
> I only have about 1gb written to it now.  Is it possible to rescue the 
> old stuff?

For all practical purposes, no.  

When you format an ext2/3 partition (assuming one was already on
that partition) you are breaking all of the pointers to the data.
Technically the data is still there but you would have to piece it
together block by block. Since you have deleted all of the pointers,
you don't know if Block 12345 is in front of Block 5678, behind it, or
not at all related.

As an exercise, I once rm-ed a 10K sized text file to recover it using the
above method.  It took me an hour and a half to do it.  The reason I was
able to do it at all is I knew the contents of the file.


-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
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800-706-0701

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