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

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2015 00:57:05 +0100, you wrote:

>Hoi Mark,
>
>Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 12:24:33 AM, you wrote:
>
>> 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!
>
>> _______________________________________________
>
>You can try if ext4magic can recover something from your journal. It's
>a good program, but it looks like the holes fell right in the journal.
>
>Also if you have an equal drive, you could try switching the boards.
>If it went so fast I think it more likely the problem is in the
>electronics and not in the disks. (Unless off cause you played
>volleybal with the disk ;) ) Unluckily you let a dumb automated
>process run over it, which makes the chances slimmer.

Switching the electronics to a different drive does not work anymore.
The drive and electronics now have builtin IDs that have to match.