Overwriting ext2 Partition with ext3

evilninja
2004-07-07T10:23:15Z

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Niki Hammler schrieb:
> mke2fs -j /device
>
> Important is the "-j" switch.
>
> What happens without the "-j" switch? All superblocks and inodes
> are overwritten. Is this true??

i don't think, that all inodes are overwritten. mkfs.?fs is pretty fast,
so it's creating the superblock and the journal (-j) only.

> However, can you tell me if it is theoretically possible to recover data
> maybe even with meta info (file name)?
> Then I would give my harddrive to a professional recover company.

we had a case here, where *something* has corrupted our shiny RAID-5
ext3fs. also we felt safe having a RAID-5, a fsck has moved a lot to
lost+found, leaving nothing in the normal dir-tree. we were still
missing a lot important files. we then tried several ext2/ext3 recovery
tools (e2undel, recover, playing with debugfs), but all seem to fail. we
happend to have a windoze machine around and we had some more luck with
a tool called "R-Linux":

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml

and despite the usual "it's impossible to recover data from ext3"
we
were able to recover a lot of files, that didn't make it to lost+found.

Christian.
- --
BOFH excuse #405:

Sysadmins unavailable because they are in a meeting talking about why
they are unavailable so much.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFA688TC/PVm5+NVoYRAmSxAKC9qtVDxepGudWnkgVQ5bj/WJ+cfwCgz4qG
jbL6zBFgZHoHfDMa7shynlU=LYB4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----