From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat May 10 11:25:12 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C81337B401 for ; Sat, 10 May 2003 11:25:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out004.verizon.net (out004pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.142]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F2CC943FA3 for ; Sat, 10 May 2003 11:25:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([129.44.60.214]) by out004.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.33 201-253-122-126-133-20030313) with ESMTP id <20030510182510.RLLF28930.out004.verizon.net@mac.com>; Sat, 10 May 2003 13:25:10 -0500 Message-ID: <3EBD4405.8060406@mac.com> Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 14:25:09 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030505 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Paul English References: <20030508220621.P31226-100000@dynamic.hydro.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <20030508220621.P31226-100000@dynamic.hydro.washington.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out004.verizon.net from [129.44.60.214] at Sat, 10 May 2003 13:25:10 -0500 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 18:25:12 -0000 Paul English wrote: [ ... ] > It wants to have fsck run - if I do that with fsck -y it will > clean the filesystem, and mount, but *everything* (all 15GB) is in > lost+found. fsck should be able to salvage some of the existing directory structure under /lost+found; are you getting a single directory full of inode-#-named files without any subdirectories? > If I just restore the superblock with fsck, and don't do > anything else, then I can mount the filesystem readonly, but then when I > mount it there is nothing there: > > #ls /mnt > ls: /mnt: Bad file descriptor What happened to the original disk? This sounds like the / directory got wiped, along with the first superblock...was the disk partially erased? > What else can I try? Pulling 15GB of data from lost+found is pretty > impractical. What are you trying to accomplish? What you might want to do depends on whether you want to simply identify your files from OS files (timestamps, if still meaningful could help here), how important recovering the directory structure is, etc. If you knew that the first XXX MB of the disk had been wiped, you might try installing the same version of FreeBSD you were running to a new filesystem of the same size and layout-- be sure to specify a 8K/1K block/frag size versus 16K/2K if that's what you had. And then copy that chunk of data over the zero'd portion of your recovered data, and see whether that helps. Or you could then perform an md5 hash of every file found on a clean install, and md5 all of the recovered files under /lost+found, and only pay attention to recovered files which don't have a checksum that matches. -Chuck PS: Given the state of employment in the tech industry, you might find that offering, say, a 6-month subscription to a "beer of the month club" to the person who helps you out the most would have astonishing results. If also happened to know that modern beer and ales originated with the Trappist abbey monks who brewed beer to serve as a meal during Lent, a modification of .sig's with comments like "will hack for food" to "will admin for beer" makes perfect sense. Beer is good food. :-)