Error resizing ext3 partition

[Nicolas Marchildon]

First, I had a primary ext3 partition from 156.885 to 25007.431 megabytes, 
and an extended one containing an other logical ext3 partition. I got rid of 
the extended one (including the logical ext3 one), so I won't mention it 
furthermore. I just rm'ed it.

Then I tried increasing the size of the first ext3 partition to include the 
space gained by deleting the extended one. I did it while it was mounted. I 
know it's stupid, but I didn't have a floppy drive to boot from. I didn't 
even try to boot as single user.

I had the hope that parted would tell me that I can't resize a partition that 
is currently mounted read-write. It didn't. Maybe it's supposed to be able to 
do it, but it failed. It took a while, and at the end, it said: "block 
relocator should have relocated 6324739".

Since then, the system was not able to find any file. I was in a KDE session, 
and I could not launch anything. In the terminal, df, du, and fdisk were not 
found. Parted was found, I don't know why (in-memory cache?).

I rm'ed the partition to recreate it with the original size, but it didn't 
work either. I rm'ed and recreated it a few times back and forth from 
original to new size (156.885 to 58644.140).

cortex:~# parted /dev/hdb print
Disk geometry for /dev/hdb: 0.000-58644.140 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031     23.532  primary   ext2        boot
3         23.533    156.884  primary   linux-swap  
2        156.885  25007.431  primary   ext2        

So, in short, the resized partition, as it was right after the resize, 
started at 156.885 and finished at 58644.140.

Attached is a dumpe2fs of /dev/hdb both for the original and resized 
partitions (I rm'ed and mkpart'ed to dump both).

I'd be interested in recovering the data, if possible ;) I did a backup of 
the important data before resizing, but it's a pain to re-install the whole 
distro...

Thanks for your help,

Nicolas Marchildon

brokenpartition-originalsize.txt
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brokenpartition-newsize.txt
Description: Text document