Ext3 users - Jun 2003 - partition magic messed up my magic number

Hi, 

I've been foolish enough to let Partition-Magic move/resize/etc. my
partitions without a prior backup.

My ext3 /dev/hda7 (was RH 9) is no longer recognised by fsck.
I tried fsck -b 8139, 32768 and 65536 - but am not quite sure 
about if these are the right ones to try.

So far I created another partition with same number of blocks and did a backup
with

dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hda8

tried 

mke2fs -S /dev/hda8
fsck.ext3 -y /dev/hda8

but this one generates a zillion of errors and quits when it's fed up. Did I
forget to specify block-size (or the like) to dd, or is that my data is plain
wiped ?
Or is there still other things to try?

Quite sad I lost about 1 year of emails ;(


________________________________________
Université de Nantes, http://www.univ-nantes.fr

On Jun 03, 2003  00:02 +0200, Michael@univ-nantes.fr
wrote:
> I've been foolish enough to let Partition-Magic move/resize/etc. my
partitions without a prior backup.
> 
> My ext3 /dev/hda7 (was RH 9) is no longer recognised by fsck.
> I tried fsck -b 8139, 32768 and 65536 - but am not quite sure 
> about if these are the right ones to try.
> 
> So far I created another partition with same number of blocks and did a
backup with
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hda8
> 
> tried 
> 
> mke2fs -S /dev/hda8
> fsck.ext3 -y /dev/hda8
> 
> but this one generates a zillion of errors and quits when it's fed up.
Did I forget to specify block-size (or the like) to dd, or is that my data is
plain wiped ?
> Or is there still other things to try?
First rule of data recovery - do not modify your disk further...  I can't
say offhand, but creating another partition and doing mke2fs on it is not
a great idea, because it is entirely possible that this overwrote some of
the data that you wanted back.

Whenever you are doing partition manipulation you are also well advised to
save the output of "sfdisk -l" or equivalent (i.e. start/end sectors
for
each partition) so you have something to fall back on.

As for recovering email, what I would do is "strings /dev/hda7" or
similar, and dump the output to ANOTHER disk/system (via ssh or NFS or
something that doesn't affect the disk in trouble).  You can likely get
a bunch of your data back (probably easy to find relevant data using
grep or something on the output text), but since it is email folders
it is likely that your files were very fragmented on disk, so you may
have a bunch of work to edit it into a useable form.  How much work you do
depends on how important your data is.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/

I'll give both a try tonight and will tell you about it later on.
Thank's a great lot to both of you.
Cheers,

Michael

________________________________________
Université de Nantes, http://www.univ-nantes.fr