Hi, I sent a message to linux-kernel that describes exactly what I did to thourally fsck up my ext3, but now I'm trying to see if I can recover more than the ext3 kernel driver will let me get to... http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=106745677408810&w=2 Now that you've read that, and you haven't given up hope (stubbornly like me), then I'd like to know what I can do to reconstruct some of the meta-data. I have one directory, (my home directory) that I'd like to get to in particular, but the directory entry refers to a cleared inode that doesn't point to any data blocks. I know some of the file names that would be in that directory, and if I could re-reference a data block back to that inode maybe I can get further. The only thing is, I haven't done this before. I'd love to have something like reiserfs's fsck that reads the entire partition and tries to reconstruct the meta-data, but alas AFAIK ext2/3 doesn't have anything like that. I have an e2image file from the fs (unfortunately after the corruption), that is ~4mb after bzip2 compression that I can send to anyone interested. ta, Mike