Johnny Hughes spake the following on 6/17/2006 12:52 PM:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:13 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction and had to try and recover. In the recent thread, the victim eventually had to resort to Google and fond some package that I can not remember now.
Well, I was perusing my YumInfo.lst.05, for general info, and I discovered this (potential) little gem. Thought I would pass it on and make it "more googleable" by adding a few keywords at the end of this. Here's the info summary.
Name : testdisk Arch : i386 Version: 6.3 Release: 1.el4.kb Size : 480 k Repo : kbs-CentOS-Extras Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
I hope it actually "looks for file-system key stuff" instead of just examining the damaged blocks (often just missing the 0x05 (?) valid flag). If so, it looks "Mahvelous Dahling!" to me. We just need to get some time to exercise this, create some test cases and find out how really good it is. As time permits, I'll do some of that, as I'm reconfig bunch of stuff all the time and have some old small disks (and systems to match that I can resurrect... Windows95 from Genuine floppies anybody?) and the interest. I'll add to this thread as things are discovered.
Anyone who has done this already, or has firsthand experience, can allow me to continue my on-going learning of new stuff by reporting on this package so I don't invest the time to evaluate this properly.
This is just a bunch of searchable words, feel free to augment as appropriate in your POV.
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
If this tool does good stuff, post the results here and I will include testdisk on the CentOS-4.4 Live CD when it is built.
I have used it a time or two, and was fairly impressed. It is a useful tool and should be in the live CD. It is on many other rescue CD's.