[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
trying to recover data
From: |
Eliot Landrum |
Subject: |
trying to recover data |
Date: |
Sat, 26 Apr 2003 13:02:55 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030303 |
Hello all..
I made a very stupid mistake last night and I'm trying to recover from
it now. I'm hoping someone might have a bit of advice or at least a next
step for me to take.
I wanted to resize some of my partitions around a little bit yesterday
to install RH9 next to WinXP and Debian. But, something is off with my
partitions and every single partition and disk tool I load complains
about the same thing. Here's what parted says:
---
Warning: Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that
another
partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it
didn't havethe correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore,but ignoring
may cause
(fixable) problems with some boot loaders.
Ignore/Cancel?
---
Partition Magic had a similar error. I printed the partitions from parted:
---
Disk geometry for /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 0.000-38166.679
megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 125.507 primary linux-swap
2 125.508 4180.979 primary fat32 boot
3 4181.010 23853.000 primary ext3
4 23854.329 38162.219 primary fat32 lba
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.
---
I thought maybe I could resize #4 to go to the very end (38166.679) and
that might fix the alignment problem. Parted was happy to ablige, and
seemed to resize it just fine.
Here's the stupid part. I forgot that my /incoming directory was a
symlink to a directory on #4. So before rebooting, I copied a directory
of mp3s from a friends computer to /incoming. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I'm banging my head against the wall over this.
So, I reboot and go to Windows. Low and behold, D: (#4) has one
directory in it (the one I copied), but all 3247 items within it are
named weird characters. I quickly loaded up PC Inspector File Recovery
(http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm) and had it scan
all of the clusters on the partition. After several minutes of scanning,
it had a few thousand directories named "Cluster #" with my data in
them! Apparently, the whole directory structure is gone. That's ok with
me, as long as I could get my data back. I tried undeleting a file to
another partition, but when I looked at the file it was full of
random/weird characters. I tried several more with all of the same
result. I've tried as many demo undelete programs for Windows as I could
find, and they all give the same result. I'm really confused because the
file names, the date stamps, and the file sizes are all correct.
I just now came back to Linux and ran parted again. It doesn't look like
the partition has changed any. The printout is the same as before. I
don't know the nitty-gritty about file systems, but I was thinking that
the data is just not aligned right with the FAT. Maybe parted moved all
of the data, but then the FAT got messed up when I copied those files to
the partition. Is that close to reality?
So... what do I do next? Is there any hope? I really, really would like
my files back. The good thing is that I haven't made any other changes
to that partition. I just had data on there, so no programs are making
changes to it as I go from Linux to Windows.
Thank you for any suggestions or guidance you can provide.
Have a great weekend!
Eliot Landrum
address@hidden
http://eliot.landrum.cx
- trying to recover data,
Eliot Landrum <=