[mythtv-users] recovery of files and filenames from ext4 partition

[Mark Perkins]

Hi all, just looking to see if anyone has any specific advice / pointers for
me.

Had to do a reboot last night of Mythbackend (Ubuntu 14.04.01). On reboot
for some reason one of the 2Tb recording drives spat hundreds of SMART
errors and crashed and the backend didn't restart (Ubuntu didn't boot). It
took a little while before I realised things weren't coming back (was doing
this on essentially headless BE) but once I realised 'all is not well' and
got a monitor on it there was just a screen full of text errors.

Rebooted, and got the standard Ubuntu file system check which I let do it
its thing (bad idea but too late now) and everything came back up normally -
except the one recording drive has no files. It is correctly partitioned
(ext4) but is file-less / directory-less. No backups (it's just TV). Gparted
is showing the correct % full but there are no files / directories listed.

What are the suggestions for recovering files. The drive is a wreck, SMART
is showing it is a failure in progress (plus it 'squeals' now) but *for now*
it is working.

Essentially I have imaged the failed drive to image file on NAS (gddrescue).
Then tried recovery with foremost but it didn't find anything. Trying now
with photorec which appears to be working well - except it does not recover
file names which renders the recordings as useless until filenames are
manually corrected, not sure I can be bothered with that.

I'm not happy about it but life is like that. I'm certainly not unhappy
enough to spend the money on backups (it's just TV). Just wondered if there
were any other steps that others would recommended in this situation. In
particular - a file recovery program that would recover files + filenames on
an ext4 partition?

Thanks in advance!