Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 9 May 1999 20:26:16 +0100 (BST) | From | Nix <> | Subject | Re: [OFFTOPIC] Searching for filesystem locator |
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Guest section DW writes: > As far as I now know, there are four utilities that attempt to > assist in recovering a lost partition table, or a partition > that was deleted by mistake.
I lost *every* partition table at once :( the Disk Manager 64-sector offset disappeared when DM shot itself, so every partition table had wrong values in it. (Need I say there were 14 extended partitions on this disk? :( )
> (iii) fixdisktable (http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/fat32.html) > is a utility that handles ext2, FAT, NTFS, ufs, BSD disklabels > (but not yet old Linux swap partitions); it actually will rewrite > the partition table, if you give it permission.
I've just tried this (thank you for pointing me at it) but it appears to suffer from a 2^31-sectors problem. I'm in the midst of debugging it because it's annoying me...
> (iv) gpart (http://home.pages.de/~michab/gpart/) is a utility > that handles ext2, FAT, Linux swap, HPFS, NTFS, FreeBSD and > Solaris/x86 disklabels, minix, reiser fs; it prints a proposed > contents for the primary partition table, and is well-documented.
... but this proved a godsend. I have the relevant offsets to dd the filesystems off the stricken box onto another one, there to loopback mount it and tar it up for the recovery phase. The offsets it gave were identical to those given by a wreck[1] I hacked up to do the same job, but it gave data for more than ext2fs, and it didn't have the off-by-one bugs that my code did :) so I've used it instead of mine.
Thanks a lot for this. I expected maybe one or two tools; four is an embarrassment of riches. It's proving surprisingly pleasant to fix this, because automated systems are doing all the grunt work for me. In the Olden Days(tm) it was all manual partition table calculations to work out something that `nearly worked' enough to get some data off, which tended to take about six hours per partition. The combination of the loopback fs and automated filesystem-spotting tools is wondrous by comparison...
... the poor sod[2] with five days of un-backed-up work in the /home that got eaten says thanks, too :)
[1] I hesitate to call it a tool. Don't write code when panicking; it gives ugly results...
[2] not me, thank goodness
-- /* I hate C so much... */ --- jwz, in driver/xscreensaver.c
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