Hard disk data recovery. 366

Hi Brian,

...

Using some backup program? Sad thing is the size of the file, more below. ...

okay, if you try to mount hdb5, then ls, what?

as root # mountdev-hdb5mnt

if you get an error here about no format, it is bad news :( try

# mount -t vfat -o rodev-hdb5mnt

# lsmnt

If you get sensible listing, then copy files frommnt to somewhere else.

Warning: speculation :o)

One could gamble on the 17GB being near the start of hdb5, go into fdisk and delete 5, then create 5 = start: 19457 end +3072 (24GB) and another 22530 - whatever for hdb6, then copy -- last resort...

Sort of, the target file is not an ISO, but can be mounted loopback, but if you're careful you may be able to mount the parbreastion and

Now I'm being vague 'cos I'm not looking over your shoulder ;) The main thing is to think about consequences, don't write to and wreck the source parbreastion.

Not knowing how you got into trouble I can only speculate on what went wrong, another possibility is that you need to offset copy the parbreastion, using dd. Skip the first cylinder. To be sure you'd want to look at the boot sector:

dd if=-dev-hdb5 bs=512 count=1 xxd

and see if it looks sane, then try next cylinder:

dd if=-dev-hdb5 bs=512 count=1 skip=63 xxd

Check `man dd` for details (I write from memory)

Grant. -- ... The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"