Success!!!
I thought everyone would be interested how I recovered original emails
from formatted space.
This is how I did it:
1) While doing a full install of SuSE 8.2 on a SuSE 8.1 system, I juggled
a few partitions and became intimately aware of where my old and new data
was located.
2) I decided that my data could be on one of two locations, in the free
space of my main directory / (/dev/hda1) and my new home directory /home
(/dev/hda3)
3) I made note of the total size of the free space of the home directory
(900 MB). The total partition size is 970 MB; therefore 70 MB went to all
the files composing the home directory, minus my precious emails)
3) From root console, I segregated (preventing any copying to it)
/dev/hda3 by unmounting it ($ umount /dev/hda3)
4) I created two 450 MB image files of the free space of /home, one for
the start and the other for the end of the free space
5) I created a blank recover file on my backup hard drive using an editor.
Starting out, I called the file recover70
6) I copied each 450 MB image file to my backup hard drive (/windowsD) and
called the file /windowsD/recover70
This is how I did it from console:
$ dd if/dev/hda3 ibs=1024 skip=70000 count=450k >> /windowsD/recover70
explanation of this: 1024 byte of info is read at a time
Information is only saved after 70 MB of data is read
Information is stopped saving after 450 MB is read
7) I used Midnight Commander (mc) at console to search this huge file for
keywords, specifically, the email address of the lost emails
8) Once the email address was located, I kept a handwritten record of its
location by noting the top right corner % number, indicating how far the
email was in the 450 MB file. I would make a note of the % each time I
searched and found something. Before I knew it, I had a list of where the
majority of the emails were located in the free space.
9) I began recovering 1 MB size files to edit with Midnight Commander.
How I did this:
Example: if an email was at the 10% mark, this represents 10% of 450
MB= 45MB = 450000 which I add to where I started recording (in this
case 70000). This give me its location from the start of /dev/hda3.
Therefore when copying the 1 MB image of the 10% email, I change the
parameters and filename so it looks like this:
$ dd if/dev/hda3 ibs=1024 skip=520000 count=1k >> /windowsD/recover52000
Believe me, it's painstaking, but I don't mind. The emails are valuable.
Whew!!!!
Very happy indeed!
Peter :))))
