On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote: I've actually managed to recover over 250++ emails from a hdd which got completely zonked -- the machine was an email server not under any particular moderate load even. The same HDD had been in use for over 2 years and had under gone 2 separate reformats (both ext2). [1] When I did the whole "strings /dev/hda2" and went through separate 1 million line parsed output I even got to see full jpeg emails from July 2000 intact -- a good 2 years back of consistent data. "strings" coughed up 5Gb of data out of an 8Gb hdd which was barely reaching 8% utilization however. [1] 250++ emails out of 7.5 million lines afterwhich I stopped. P.S I don't recommend it to anyone which wants to preserve sanity :-) (snip) > Short answer --- you can't. Formatting will have completely erased > all information about where the various files are on disk. > > If you really really need to find some data from the reformatted disk, > then the chances are that the data blocks are still present on disk, > but the inode data (which tells you who owns what file and where the > data is on disk) is completely gone. The only way to recover anything > will be to get a binary disk block editor and to search the disk > manually for the bits of data you want to retrieve. _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
