On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:01:25 +0100, Alex Schuster wrote > Uwe Thiem writes: > > > On Friday 15 February 2008, pat wrote: > > > On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:41:28 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote > > > > > > > Neil, you are a master of understatement :-) > > > > > > > > pat, it might be possible to get some stuff back, IF he remounted > > > > ro immediately and IF not much writing to the disk happened in > > > > the meantime. > > > > > > > > However, by the time you are done it is usually not worth the > > > > effort it took. It's easier to reinstall and restore backups. But > > > > if there are some irreplaceable files on that disk, you have no > > > > choice. good luck to him. > > > > > > There's a home directory ... . > > > > What do you mean, Pat? /home still exists and is populated? > > I think he means there _was_ a /home directory. > > I'd mout ro, and backup all files that are still there. photorec will find > lots of files, but only as single files, without the directory structure. See > <http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec> for a > list of supported file types. > > There are undelete tools for ext2, but I heard they should not work with > ext3, because it zeros out things instead of just marking them as deleted as > it was in ext2. However, I also heard that someone had success with midnight > commander, which has an undelete feature (F9, Commands menu). > > I did not try it, but this tool sounds promising: > http://freshmeat.net/projects/giis > > giis (gET iT i sAY) is a file recovery tool for Ext2/Ext3 filesystems. Once > installed, current files and newly created files can be recovered. It allows > users to recover all deleted files, recover files owned by a specific user, > dump data from old file locations, and recover files of a specific type, such > as text or PNG. A forensic analyzer is also provided to assist users during > recovery. >
Yes, there was the home directory. Thanks to all for the help. Pat