Hosed ext3 superblock -- partial success, but about those nameless mysql files...

[Charles Bennett]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 20:24 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 06/02/2010 01:15 PM, Ling Cheung wrote:
> > Well, I followed Charles's advice, and the result was about the same as my previous attempt, but this time I looked into that lost+found directory a bit more closely.  I had overlooked the fact that some of these files are intact directories.  I seem to have more usable data than I realized.
> >
> > I've found some of the most important stuff.  I'll reinstall Ubuntu on a new hard drive and try to salvage the data I want.
> >
> > Among the evidently less usable data is a bunch of mysql files with missing file names (that is, with names like #15901557).  I know the file type, thanks to the file command.  I think that these are from mythtv, since that's the only database I seem to be missing.  It would be nice to recover my mythtv database for a few reasons, if I can do so without too much hassle.
> >
> > Is there a clever way to determine which file is which?
> >    
> Lost+found is a place where files go when they lose their directories. 
> The #15901557should be the inode number of that file. Directories 
> essentially contain the file names and their inode #.  Directories are 
> files too, and they can be grep'd. I haven't recovered files like this 
> for a long time.
> 

For future reference: a handy nightly script to run is:


for FSROOT in $(cat /proc/mounts | awk '$3 == "ext2" || $3 == "ext3" { print $2 }'); do
  ( cd $FSROOT
    FP=$(echo $FSROOT| sed 's/%/%%/p') # mask % in mount point name
    find . -xdev -printf "$FP\t%p\t%i\n"
  )
done

Stuff the output somewhere off-box.  If you ever have an fsck
catastrophe, it'll come in handy for putting this back together from
lost+found.


ccb