file recovery for bad drives

[nbodley at speakeasy.net (Nicholas Bodley)]

On Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:41:53 -0400, jbk <jbk at mail2.gis.net> wrote:

> Testdisk comes with a lot of distributions

I just Googled on [testdisk], and found several encouraging "hits".  
Thanks, so much!

Some time back, I mistakenly over-wrote a FAT32 archive partition (~17 GB,  
iirc) with an ext3fs. As soon as I finished licking my mental wounds, I  
decided to leave that partition strictly untouched. It's now a peculiar  
"hybrid" that I plan to copy to another HD ([dd] command?) before  
attempting recovery. Win thinks it's unformatted, and a Linux  
Partition-Magic-like graphic display (GParted?) shows most of it unused.  
It does seem that I've overwritten both copies of the FAT (beginning of  
the partition), as well as some small percentage of the files.

Not yet asking for help, really, but am curious about whether there's any  
chance of reconstructing the FAT(s).  Fortunately, I had defragged,  
shortly before munging.

(As to how it happened: Had Win C:, D:, and E: partitions, as well as  
Linux + Linux swap. Win D: is for any decently-written executables, and E:  
was for archives.

(Had some extra space in D:, and made a small partition there to try out  
either DSL or Vector Linux. Booted Linux, and used (iirc) mkfs:ext3fs (as  
root, probably sudo), but made the wrong assumption about [hda{n}]  
numbering. IIrc, I thought the highest-numbered [hda] was the newest, but,  
it wasn't. Pretty sure E: was originally hda6, but it had become hda7.  
**Ouch**. Once I saw the progress of the command, I was horrified, but  
decided to let it finish, thinking that aborting would only make matters  
even worse.))

I do think such a potentially-destructive command as [mkfs] should do some  
simple, practical checks on the partition about to have an f/s built in  
it, and put up a warning, if things don't look right. After all, iirc, [rm  
* -f] with the recursive option does ask, first. Wonder whether a polite  
note to the GNU folks would be considered by them.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicholas Bodley  /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
A commentator for Howthingswork at YahooGroups
who eventually munged a couple of his Linux installations


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