On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Alexey Fisher <bug-track@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Am Freitag, den 06.11.2009, 09:04 -0500 schrieb Theodore Tso: >> On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 05:57:14PM +0600, Alexey Salmin wrote: >> > I think the only thing I can recommend to you is to "grep for your >> > files and hope for the best" (c) >> > I don't know any automated way to restore files after complete >> > destroying of fs, but there always is grep and hexdump :) >> >> Unfortunately, there isn't much else that can be done, since the inode >> table has been zero'ed out. > > Do _not_ever_ change the disk after crush or what ever you did with it. > Make an image of your partition (dd if=/dev/you_partition > of=backup_of_partition) and try testdisk (photoreck) and/or sleuthkit. > > Alexey Totally agree with Alexey, but if the virtual drive was using a file and not a partition or full drive, then you can just make a copy of the virtual drive. Then try to recover from the copy. Make more copies as you have problems, etc. If the inodes are gone (and likely they are), then the only other option you have left is "data carving". Data carving depends on having your files useing contiguous blocks. With ext4 and files less than 128MB (one extent), there is a reasonble chance I believe that they will be contiguous. I use a professional ($) tool to data carve, but I'm pretty sure there are some opensource tools out there. The way the work is to scan all the sectors on the drive (of virtual drive) and look for file header signatures. A lot of complex file types have those. And then they either find the file length somehow from the internal file header, or they just grab x bytes of contiguous data after the header. Files over 128 MB will use 2 ext4 extents and I don't think there is much chance of the extents being contiguous. Possibly Ted or Eric can comment on that? Greg -- Greg Freemyer Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer Preservation and Forensic processing of Exchange Repositories White Paper - <http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/tng_whitepaper_fpe.html> The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
