Reformatted important partition, how can I recover

[Hootiegibbon]

wedgetail,

If it helps on the WMii Iso I have as part of the livecd Photorec, foremost and safecopy all of which are recovery applications perhaps they could be of help?

Jase

[wedgetail]

Hootiegibbon
Thank you for the information I will look at that. My hope of retrieving anything at all is 1% at this stage. Not as much a a single byte and I simply don't understand.   I am not that familiar with deep levels of Linux but have learnt a bit about superblocks, inodes etc. Something else than an ordinary re-format has taken place.  On a number of occasions I have recovered similar accidents on my Windows pc's after a lot of interesting and hard work.

I am going to run a few experiments in the coming hours to give me some more insight as I am getting stubborn.      After the 12 hour zeroing excercise of a new 1TB hard drive using dd The partition is so empty I started to wonder if a LiveCD does a quick zero before installing and if that is the case I am down the drain.  I had never thought of that.

[wedgetail]

I am being pummeled seriously by KDE2010.12, my stand in workhorse, which is no saying enough is enough    Having to retreat to MiniMe now to post this.

In an effort to find some file or any file on my "lost" drive, of which I have a copy here on /dev/sdb1.  After testdisk gave up on me, or is it the other way around, I finally gave up and relented and installed photorec on the present workhorse system on /dev/sda12 and was getting to know it again. It was finding files by the thousands.

Having trouble finding a location to store the result, I decided to store output on /dev/sdb2 the partition next to the image copy I am working upon. The partition was duly mounted

Code: [Select]

mount /dev/sdb2  /here

and I returned to start photorec pointing output to /there alls seem well. I stopped and started searching different files. Finally got a bit sick of that and stopped photorec to consider the situation.  Long and the short computer got really slow, I restarted and login went into a loop I could not get in as user.

Can get in as root and have found that my /home is full and for that matter the whole patition:

Code: [Select]

[root@localhost gert]# df /dev/sda12
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda12             20G   20G     0 100% /media/mythtvkde12
[root@localhost gert]#

Looking with Dolphin I can't figure where the space is taken up. I can't think straight anymore.  

Question: there is a command line statement that will list files and use?  

[Old-Polack]

Having trouble finding a location to store the result, I decided to store output on /dev/sdb2 the partition next to the image copy I am working upon. The partition was duly mounted

Code: [Select]

mount /dev/sdb2  /here

and I returned to start photorec pointing output to /there  

If it's not a typo, you mounted the storage partition on /here, then pointed photorec at /there, which would then store all the recovered files on your / partition, not the storage partition.

[wedgetail]

I am struggling but will get there, I think it is a typo, trying to find my record that I thought I kept, in the mean time I find 139 directories taking up about 7 GB on the /dev/sdb2 so at some time files went there.

Edit:

I have mounted /dev/sda12 on /gremlin

Code: [Select]

[root@localhost gert]# du -a -h /gremlin/here |grep G
1.7G    /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15/f5054080.pdf
2.6G    /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15/f36917248.pdf
3.9G    /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15/f46746256.pdf
2.6G    /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15/f18273296.pdf
1.6G    /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15/f14918800.pdf
16G     /gremlin/here/recup_dir.15
17G     /gremlin/here
[root@localhost gert]#

What on earth is going on.   but at least the partition really is full.  At some stage I must have sent output to the wrong location. One explanation could be that the mount at one stage failed and I did not notice, then that follows your suggestion, but to /here

Back and try again to get everything from photorec to /dev/sdb2

Edit:
While I was running MiniMe2010 to get above files, I also deleted them all to start afresh.  Rebooted and selected KDE2010.12, but it still did not want to let me log in as user.  I logged in as root but only 30 seconds later I was told I was low on storage in /home (which is part of the / partition, as I only run one partition systems).  The recovered file overflow was back even before doing anything  since I was root I deleted the lot again.

Logged out as root and logged in as User this time with no problem. I am now using the system again, I did have to "reset" the Video size just a tad,  by using PCC - Harware - Graphics - Test, for some reason that is all I need to do and sometimes not even that.  I have seen this before but I think it is first time in KDE2010.12.

[wedgetail]

I am just leaving the file recovery for the moment and returning to testdisk:

Scenario:



1..  /dev/sdb8 partition made up after the whole drive /dev/sdb was zeroed, using dd (12 hour exercise)
   formatted by using mke2fs -t ext4 -L DELTA-08 /dev/sdb8


2..  Installed KDE2010.12 on the partition partition /dev/sdb8 by doing "rsync -av ...."
   of a running backup copy of KDE2010.12 held on /dev/sda13
   
3..  Made a quick boot stanza in my boot menu.lst and checked that the system could run.

4..  From another KDE2010.12, my normal work horse I then glee fully and with great satisfaction "simple formatted" /dev/sdb8
   by using mke2fs -t ext4 -L DELTA-08-DONE /dev/sdb8

Definition: "simple formatted" formatted the partition with the same file system as it already had


Now I change my mind, I want to recover the previous running system on the partition.

My understanding was that this was just the job for "testdisk"?   Am I right or wrong?

If I am right I have misunderstood something when running "testdisk" and will then return to that