[CLUE-Tech] URGENT HELP: recover from fdisk

[Dave Anselmi]

Brandon N wrote:

> anyone know if there is a way to recover data from a mistaken *ahem*
> fdisk?

If all you did was fdisk, there's hope.  You will have hosed your
partition table, but your filesystems and data are intact.  The easiest
fix is to redo fdisk and put everything back the way it was (do you
remember what partitions you had and how big they were?)

If you can at least get the start of a partition where it was, and the
end preferably past the end of the filesystem on that partition, you
should be able to get data off the fs.  You might be able to check the
size (df) and refigure the end of the partition, but that's hard because
of how KB, MB, and cylinders are used inconsistently to show sizes.

If you have space that can hold the whole drive (tape, a bigger drive, a
partition in unused space (and far from the partitions you've hosed)),
you can dd a backup so that if you hose it worse you can at least get
back to where you started.

Finally, there is a HOWTO about undeleting files from ext2fs.  Take a
look at it and at other fs HOWTOs in the same category and see if they
help.

Sorry I don't have a silver bullet, but if you haven't written into the
the new partitions, there's hope.  I have been playing with moving
partitions around (with data in them by making complete copies), so if
you want more help, let me know more details about what you had and what
you did.

Dave