On 4/3/22 9:44 AM, harold wrote: ...
Hi everybody, good day everyone, ladies and gentlemen.. I’m looking for a way to retrieve back my data vanished accidentally .. I tell you more : a/ I had windows and linux mint 18 (gpt/efi) b/ I add openbsd to these double systems. Now three. Grub2 manages it.
"I have a problem, I'll use grub to fix it" ...now you have two problems. [various thrashings I couldn't reproduce with the info given, but our problem count is much more than two now]
L/ I just think I just have to reinstall openbsd. I do it, with the wise attention to do not affect mounting point to the raid/home slice, then I can easily get back my data. A bit like not formatting /home under linux. I install openbsd.
Hint: when you say "like ... linux", you are almost certainly doing (or about to do) something wrong.
M/ like a newb after installation I start openbsd and mount back my softraid partition. It asks for my password, recognize it. Slice looks empty. Df shows only few kb files. Data is gone. No backup.
Two points : *looks like it’s not possible to reinsall openbsd without formatting everything. A bit sad, where it’s not said, and I carefuly took attention to not format the softraid slice. But it did anyway.
No. That's not true. Don't define a mount point for a file system on install, it won't get formatted. Add it to fstab post-install. Trivial. Not done like Linux -- which is wonderful. OpenBSD has done it this way for at least 25 years now. Linux can't say that about much of anything.
*how a softraid slice could be formatted and my password recognized ?
If you understand how this works, your question becomes meaningless. Softraid creates imaginary DISKS. -> Unlocking a Softraid encrypted DISK requires a password. Disks have partitions. Partitions hold file systems. File systems are formatted. Not "disks". Got it? If not, read through https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html top-to-bottom until it's understood.
*I tried with testdisk, then photorec, impossible to get a hand of my data. I didnt used openbsd since, to hope recover my data. I did not wrote on it since, to avoid writing/erasing on it.
Well, since BSD FFS has almost zero support in the Linux world (I'm presuming that's because a solid, stable guest file system with 30 years of history would make Linux's "File System of the Month" look bad), yeah, I don't think you will see anything. And think about it a little bit... If a Linux tool could find data on an OpenBSD encrypted disk, pretty sure that would be an indicator of a really big flaw in the encryption. If you are going to find your data, you need to recreate the disklabel partitions exactly as they were on the encrypted FFS from OpenBSD. scan_ffs(8) may help. Boot from OpenBSD, unlock your encrypted disk and dig around in it. But if you formatted the partitions, you have made quite a mess of the file system. Blocks of data probably exist but reassembling them into useful files will be difficult.
If somebody where able to help me to recover my data..
Honestly, not likely to happen. You aren't providing any hard information, just a lot of vague and "subject to interpretation" statements. I'm going to assume you have written too much where the old file systems were to pull 'em back from the format. Here's the thing -- Multibooting is COMPLICATED. You have to have a mastery of the boot process of ALL the OSs involved AND master all the tools used to accomplish multibooting. This is NOT a good way to "learn a new OS". It is a great way to lose all the data on a multi-booting machine. You really can't trust Linux tools for multibooting. They basically pretend nothing other than Linux and Windows exists. The more hand-holding a Linux system is, the more likely it is to be to make bad assumptions about what you are doing, and assume you are running Windows+Linux. Also...by design, real encrypted disks are fragile. Easy to mess up, almost impossible to recover if messed up. That's a feature, not a flaw. So you have a doubly unstable system. Backups are critical. You didn't have 'em. Nick.
