In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
interested in recovering the data.

More info: This is a Dell Inspiron machine, 2.0GHz dual-core Intel
processor, 2GB RAM, 80GB 7000RPM hard drive, ATI X1400 video. The disk
is partitioned with sda1: 15GB /; sda2: 15 GB blank (Fedora was to go
here) ; sda3: 3GB swap ; sda4: ~47 GB /home. I set these partitions a
few months ago when I last installed Ubuntu. I had begun install of
Fedora 7 when the machine crashed- I didn't get to the real install
part. Upon rebooting (into Ubuntu), it complained something about
inodes. I gave it the root paassword (yes, I had previously set a root
password) and ran fsck (or something else resembling a rather
unacceptable work, appropriate name by the way). A few Y, Y, Y's later
I could boot the system. However, as soon as I logged into KDE I was
returned to the login screen. I CTRL-ALT-F4ed into a terminal and
logged in as root. I then cd'ed into /home, and ls showed that there
was nothing there. I immediatly ran shutdown -h and now that I'm home
I'm writing from the wife's desktop.

Any in recovering the /home/user directory, or even specific
files therein, whould be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Dotan Cohen

http://lyricslist.com/
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On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:05:38AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
> partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
> knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
> I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
> have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
> but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
> interested in recovering the data.

A corrupted /home should not keep you from booting. You may need to go
single-user or init=/bin/sh but it should boot.

Probably should have backed up more recently. It sounds like you made
things worse with the YYY.

Good luck.

Doug.


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On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:05:38AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
> partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
> knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
> I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
> have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
> but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
> interested in recovering the data.

A corrupted /home should not keep you from booting. You may need to go
single-user or init=/bin/sh but it should boot.

Probably should have backed up more recently. It sounds like you made
things worse with the YYY.

Good luck.

Doug.


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On 30/07/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:05:38AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
> > partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
> > knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
> > I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
> > have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
> > but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
> > interested in recovering the data.
>
> A corrupted /home should not keep you from booting. You may need to go
> single-user or init=/bin/sh but it should boot.
>
> Probably should have backed up more recently. It sounds like you made
> things worse with the YYY.
>
> Good luck.
>
> Doug.
>

Maybe something additional was corrupted, bu I only remember seeing
references to sda4, which is /home. Any idea how to get the data back?

Dotan Cohen

http://lyricslist.com/
http://what-is-what.com/


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On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:34:55AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> Maybe something additional was corrupted, bu I only remember seeing
> references to sda4, which is /home. Any idea how to get the data back?

It may have been placed in /home/lost+found named after its inode
number, i.e. filenames that are all numbers. Failing that, no,
probably not.

If they are text files you may be able to unmount the device and
grep the raw device file for known text in the files, e.g.

# less /dev/sda4

'/' to search for text

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFGrSaYIJm2TL8VSQsRArSfAJwMJBn2JWdBmhmdKxE5S7 fVG6oKGACeOvQy
Zifj5PhAFlcz7F+TGLaaWvg=
=lDGQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:34:55AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 30/07/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:05:38AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > > In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
> > > partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
> > > knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
> > > I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
> > > have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
> > > but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
> > > interested in recovering the data.
> >
> > A corrupted /home should not keep you from booting. You may need to go
> > single-user or init=/bin/sh but it should boot.

> Maybe something additional was corrupted, bu I only remember seeing
> references to sda4, which is /home. Any idea how to get the data back?
>

Undeletion in *NIX is either very difficult, expensive, or impossible.
Unless you got lucky and they ended up in lost+found only slightly
mangled.

If you want to try recovery, unmount sda4 and remove it from fstab.
With it mounted, things change. Then aptitude search ~drecover and look
at some tools. Try something like foremost or magicrescue. Read the
documentation, follow the instructions, and only mount the partition
again if it says to. Often such tools work by reading the block device
itself, bypassing the filesystem.

Doug.


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Dotan Cohen wrote:
> Now, /home is empty.

Look in /home/lost+found.
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On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:

> In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
> partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
> knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
> I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
> have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
> but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
> interested in recovering the data.
>
> More info: This is a Dell Inspiron machine, 2.0GHz dual-core Intel
> processor, 2GB RAM, 80GB 7000RPM hard drive, ATI X1400 video. The disk
> is partitioned with sda1: 15GB /; sda2: 15 GB blank (Fedora was to go
> here) ; sda3: 3GB swap ; sda4: ~47 GB /home. I set these partitions a
> few months ago when I last installed Ubuntu. I had begun install of
> Fedora 7 when the machine crashed- I didn't get to the real install
> part. Upon rebooting (into Ubuntu), it complained something about
> inodes. I gave it the root paassword (yes, I had previously set a root
> password) and ran fsck (or something else resembling a rather
> unacceptable work, appropriate name by the way). A few Y, Y, Y's later
> I could boot the system. However, as soon as I logged into KDE I was
> returned to the login screen. I CTRL-ALT-F4ed into a terminal and
> logged in as root. I then cd'ed into /home, and ls showed that there
> was nothing there. I immediatly ran shutdown -h and now that I'm home
> I'm writing from the wife's desktop.
>
> Any in recovering the /home/user directory, or even specific
> files therein, whould be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
>
> Dotan Cohen
>
> http://lyricslist.com/
> http://what-is-what.com/
>

Hi Dotan,

So, when you boot up and get a prompt, I take it that /home is indeed
being mounted? If so, one thing you might want to do, is look in
/home/lost+found , in there you might be able to find your files, but they
won't be named the same though. If they are there, they will be named
numerically..


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On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:

> On 30/07/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:05:38AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>> In a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu) I have had a corruption of my /home
>>> partition, which resides on sda4 of my Dell Inspiron laptop. Not
>>> knowing what to do, and with no way to boot and google the situation,
>>> I played Y, Y, Y to all fsck's questions. Now, /home is empty. I do
>>> have a backup from 4 weeks ago, as I backup the first of every month,
>>> but I have done quite a bit of work this past month. I'm very
>>> interested in recovering the data.
>>
>> A corrupted /home should not keep you from booting. You may need to go
>> single-user or init=/bin/sh but it should boot.
>>
>> Probably should have backed up more recently. It sounds like you made
>> things worse with the YYY.
>>
>> Good luck.
>>
>> Doug.
>>
>
> Maybe something additional was corrupted, bu I only remember seeing
> references to sda4, which is /home. Any idea how to get the data back?
>
> Dotan Cohen
>

Hi Dotan,

So, when you boot up and get a prompt, I take it that /home is indeed
being mounted? If so, one thing you might want to do, is look in
/home/lost+found , in there you might be able to find your files, but they
won't be named the same though. If they are there, they will be named
numerically..


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The disk simply was not mounted! I've now mounted it, and I'm backing
it up. Reading up on rsync, as well. Sorry for the false alarm...

Dotan Cohen

http://lyricslist.com/
http://what-is-what.com/


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On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 04:04:29AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> The disk simply was not mounted! I've now mounted it, and I'm backing
> it up. Reading up on rsync, as well. Sorry for the false alarm...
>

df is your friend.

Once you have it backed up, compare it with your previous backup. It is
possible that some files may be missing.

Doug.


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On 30/07/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 04:04:29AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > The disk simply was not mounted! I've now mounted it, and I'm backing
> > it up. Reading up on rsync, as well. Sorry for the false alarm...
> >
>
> df is your friend.
>
> Once you have it backed up, compare it with your previous backup. It is
> possible that some files may be missing.
>
> Doug.
>

Thanks, Doug. That last backup is way out of date, so it would not be
an accurate check. But I will go through it and check for missing
files. Thanks.

Dotan Cohen

http://lyricslist.com/
http://what-is-what.com/


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