Hi! We have a server still running Debian 3.0 (Woody) that nobody likes to touch for maintenance ... ;) Our home-directories are located on a separate HDD (30GB, 1 large primary ext3 partition) and until yesterday it worked correctly. Because the partition was nearly full we had to enlarge our home-space by moving it to a larger HDD. We decided to try a copy of whole partition by using gparted from the "SystemRescueCd" (http://www.sysresccd.org). The first try failed, because the FS-type of our home-partition wasn't recognized. A second boot was tried and this time the FS-type was recognized correctly so we started copying the partition to another HDD (80GB). After about 40% to 50% the copy-procedure crashed an left our system in an unusable state. The only way to re-use the sytem was to press the "Reset"-button. Because we thought that the reason of this crash was caused by an error in the APM-funcionality we tried it once more by booting the kernel using the "noapm" parameter. But even this try crashed ... After we rebooted again I mounted the source-partition to check it's content. But all I found were three files visible on the partition. The directory containing the userfiles was completely gone an in "lost&found" there are hundreds of items. After this horrifying discovery I unmounted the partition and subscribed this mailing-list ... ;) Unfortunately also our whole webserver-files were located in this directory ... Now my question: Is there any possibility to restore my directory (completely or at least partial)? Thanx in advance for your help!!! Bye Juergen
On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, J?rgen Landsmann wrote:> Our home-directories are located on a separate HDD (30GB, 1 large primary > ext3 partition) and until yesterday it worked correctly....30 GB and no backups?> Because the > partition was nearly full we had to enlarge our home-space by moving it to a > larger HDD. > We decided to try a copy of whole partition by using gparted from the > "SystemRescueCd" (http://www.sysresccd.org).Why would you do this? What's wrong with tar/cp?> Because we thought that the reason of this crash was caused by an error in > the APM-funcionality we tried it once more by booting the kernel using the > "noapm" parameter. But even this try crashed ...Any more details regarding the crashes? log messages, sysrq-t available?> The directory containing the userfiles was completely gone an in "lost&found" > there are hundreds of items.Ouch :( Not much you can do here. I'd take a first look with "file /lost+found/*" to see if there's something useful in there. ext2/3-recovery tools are out there, but I guess you'll have to try a few and see if they can recover anything: - e2undel, recover (both available as debian packages in unstable) - R-Linux, a free (as in beer) recovery tool for win32 (works pretty good though) - ...and then there's always grep(1) & friends :( hth, Christian. -- make bzImage, not war