Re: /var and /home are gone
on Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 03:12:11PM -0400, Jonathan Brandmeyer (jbrandmeyer@earthlink.net) wrote:
> Due to a series of stupid mistakes, I have managed to completely delete all
> of /home and /var. Is there any way to recover?
Yes. From your regularly and frequenlty performed backup archives.
Consider this a lesson learned.
> It went like this:
> / was getting too big for its partition, due to a large cache of packages in
> /var.
# Use one of the following regularly. man apt-get first.
$ apt-get autoclean
$ apt-get clean
> Partitioned out 2GB of free space for /var.
> mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb6 (the new partition)
> mv /var /var.old
> mkdir /var
> edited /etc/fstab to add a line to mount /dev/hdb6 to /var
> *BUT* I type-o'ed and mounted /dev/hdb5 to /var
> (dev/hdb5 is /home)
> mv /var.old /var
> cd /var
> ls
> ( notice that my home directory is in there. Wonder how. Delete it.)
> cd /home
> (notice that /varish stuff is in there. Wonder how. Delete it too. God
> how stupid.)
> init 2
> Notice that syslogd takes forever to start. Seems to freeze, but then the
> system continues to startup.
> GDM can't find some file under /var.
> >From a TTY, go poking around. Discover my error on /etc/fstab. umount and
> mount to see what is actually there. Discover /var and /home are nearly
> empty (only lost+found is there, it's empty) And scream.
>
> In theory, I know that most of the files should actually still be on the
> disk, but I have no idea how to recover them or if it is practically
> possible.
>
> Please Help,
> Jonathan
'mc' (midnight commander) can recover some files deleted from ext2fs
partitions, in the right circumstances.
> P.S. In case it helps, here is my HDD setup:
> /dev/hdb1 ext2fs /
> /dev/hdb2 swap
> /dev/hdb3 ext2fs /usr
> /dev/hdb4 extended
> /dev/hdb5 ext3fs /home
> /dev/hdb6 ext3fs /var
Kiss your data goodbye. Odds of successful journaled data recover are
slim to nill.
> /dev/hda1 ntfs /winxp (read-only)
What! You didn't nuke it while you had the chance ;-)
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Geek for hire: http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html
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