[mythtv-users] Recovering recordings from corrupted partition

[James Crow]

On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 22:13 +0000, Ian Clark wrote:
> 
> 
> 2008/11/26 Torsten Crass <torsten.crass at ebiology.de>
>         Hi Jon,
>         
>         [Snip dd woes]
> 
> dd can be a major source of pain. :( If it's any consolation we've all
> done it at some point. ;)
> 
> Once you've finished recovering the drive, before you finally format
> it it /might/ be worth running mkfs.ext3 with the -S option, then
> fscking the drive, it's unlikely to yeild anything but it might just
> give it enough info to reconstruct something into a lost+found dir? 
> 
> It'll modify the drive though so don't try it unless you've got a byte
> level backup or are about to wipe it anyway.
> 
> From the mkfs.ext3 man page:
> 
>        -S     Write superblock and group descriptors only.  This is
> useful  if
>               all  of the superblock and backup superblocks are
> corrupted, and
>               a last-ditch recovery method is desired.  It  causes
> mke2fs  to
>               reinitialize  the  superblock  and  group descriptors,
> while not
>               touching the inode table and the block and inode
> bitmaps.   The
>               e2fsck  program  should  be run immediately after this
> option is
>               used, and there is no guarantee that any data will  be
> salvageâ
>               able.   It  is critical to specify the correct
> filesystem blockâ
>               size when using this option, or there is no chance of
> recovery.
> 
> 
> Apologies if you've already been down this route with no sucess. :( 
> 
>         

Because the filesystem is ext3 you can try to recover based on a backup
superblock. man e2fsck and look at the '-b' option.

Cheers,
James