Ext3 Data Recovery

[SMS]

Ive been using FC5 on my sony vaio and yesterday my main linux partition crashed.

while using the computer, the hdd starting making some strange noise and it hung. on hard reboot it boots up very slow and on trying to log in it gives some error about unable to find /home

i replaced the hard disk. and installed FC5 on a new hard disk.

the corupt hdd i attached on a USB connector.

I can only see the /boot partation.

The volume manager shows me the main partation as unused space.

i used dd to make image of the corupt data.

dd if=/dev/sda7 of=~/corupt.img

it made a 19 GB(the corrupt partitio's size) file in my home directory.

I greped out the most important text file i had.

Before anyone starts lecturing me about backups id like to recover more stuff...

evolution data files(most important), firefox profile, some bash scripts in my /home

Is there any professional service in thailand who can recover data off ext3 partition? im in a hurry.

in the mean time im trying out the various applications available for windows on a spare windows box, but i think its going to take time, no luck yet.

Looking forward to some help.

[autonomous_unit]

If you have a machine with an extra internal drive bay and controller port, you might want to get it in there to use the S.M.A.R.T. tools to verify why it crashed, but it does sound like it went into bad block mode. However, that should not have made your filesystem partition "unused" unless the partition table block failed or something! If you were running unusual software that misbehaved, or have other hardware problems, there is nothing to prevent a repeat with the new drive...

If you have space, make copies of the saved image so you can experiment on one and then revert to the original if it is a dead end. I am not sure how familiar you are with various Linux tasks, so here are several to try:

mount -o loop,ro saved.img /mnt/tmp

(now that you've copied the disk partition, you shouldn't get any long delays with the disk trying to recover bad blocks, so this will quickly tell you just how corrupt it is)

man debugfs

(this tool can give you some interactive access to a filesystem that is damaged and not able to mount successfully as above)

man e2fsck

(this can run in repair mode and fix certain metadata problems. however, on badly mangled filesystems it might just make matters worse, and your "grepping" of underlying file content may be the better recovery method if you are only aiming to recover a few more specific files.)

[SMS]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your input autonomous.

im a total newbie in lunux...

i tried the mount but had problems

[root@localhost xxx]# mount -o loop,ro corupt.img /mnt/tmp
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root@localhost xxx]# mount -o loop,ro -t ext3 corupt.img /mnt/tmp
mount: mount point /mnt/tmp does not exist
[root@localhost xxx]# mkdir /mnt/tmp
[root@localhost xxx]# mount -o loop,ro -t ext3 corupt.img /mnt/tmp
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
   missing codepage or other error
   In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
   dmesg | tail  or so

[root@localhost xxx]#

I dont have a spare internal bay to test the smart. my spare pc wont accept notebook hdds too...

i tried an application on windows(spare machine, damaged hdd connected via USB ) called Nucleus kernel linux and it was able to recover my files... apparently all of my files.

My attempt to restore evolution data suceeded but only to a point.

reference : http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/12/03/how...ckup-evolution/

i copied

1. ~/.evolution/

2. ~/.gconf/apps/evolution/

3. ~/.gnome2_private/Evolution

from old hdd to the new one. evolution started fine. mail accounts werent there...but emails and filters were in place. i added one of the mail accounts did a send and recieve ...everything ok.

now when i start evolution again it says sorting(in status bar) forever! it fast until 86% then sort of hangs..... is this a possible indicator of file corruption?

Is there a fix?

[SMS]

Ok... Evolution problem solved by deleting summary files...

//happy linux user again.