First off, thanks everyone for all the tips and suggestions.
On 31 Jul 2003, Jesse Kline wrote: > I always keep a close eye on transfers when I'm backing up my home > partition. If I'm backing up hidden files, I usually get errors trying > to copy Konqueror cache files, because of their names. If I get any > errors I usually try to figure out why and get the copy to work > properly. I have never used reiserfsck, was it a ReiserFS filesystem? > I've never had any luck recovering lost data, so my guess is that if the > data is lost, your not going to get it back. > Yes, it's in Reiser format (0x83). Its been a long night. I've read and tried a lot of ideas. So far, I think my best bet is to make an image of the free spaces on the hard drive using in console the dd command. More explanations are in the man pages for dd and with info dd. In creating an image file, I read about starting an input file (if) and then keep appending to an output file (of) and from console something like this: dd if=/dev/hdXX(where info is) bsize=1024 skip=1257 count=256 >> /dev/hdXX(other_partition)/recover_file Once created, the recover_file can be examined. Right now, what's slowing me down is to determine the exact start and end points of the free spaces and getting them to successfully append. I've been using debugfs in console to get the inode and block counts. Also from debugfs I got the location of the first free block with the command debugfs: ffb and ffi for the first inode. As for locating and rebuilding the data structure of the buried information using reiserfsck, it's is very risky without knowing all the parameters. The whole linux drive will crash if just one parameter is off. Other options include an opensource program that I downloaded from freshmeat called Test Disk 4.4, which works in Linux and Windows. Since I don't want to write-over any space that I'm trying to recover, I chose to run Test Disk from Windows. It managed to see all partitions (Fat32, Linux Reiser). BTW, Test Disk can see many more partition types, over 20 of them. It couldn't recover any deleted files though, only files that may have been corrupted. This is why I think data recovery is more possible by creating an image file. Another program I will look at is gpage which comes with linux. Plugging away. Peter
