On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:20:23PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote: > On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 02:57:49PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > Hi all, mildly off-topic, perhaps. > > > > Due to a cascading series of errors on my part yesterday, I managed to > > not only wipe over my partition table, but also overwrite enough data > > in the actual disk to prevent reasonable recovery of the partitions > > with such tools as gpart. > > > > I could recover /boot, and /swap, but the lvm-hosted remaining portion > > of the system was hosed, mostly because I couldn't accurately locate > > the partition. Maybe if I'd been a little smarter about it, I could > > have, but I didn't know, until too late, what exactly to look for. So, > > after much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing, I decided to > > reinstall. [...] > A couple good utilites I've used in situations like these are testdisk > and photorec. Photorec can recover files even if there is no partition > table (it won't know the filename, but it will tell you the file type). to be clear, I was able to see portions of file systems and actually found all of / using gnu-fdisk's "Rescue" feature. I was able to mount and fsck it and it checked out okay. But that fs was buried in an lvm partition *and* it couldn't find other filesystems. Since I run multiple lv's in lv to hold the system, it wasn't much use... having / without /usr and /var is not really that great. gpart found /boot and /swap(not much use), but /boot was corrupted pretty badly. It did *not* find anything in the lvm partition, though I got tired of waiting for it, so maybe it would have eventually. This has caused me to rethink the use of lvm on this system. Although I like the flexibility, I'm not so sure it's not just better to use one large partition for everything. What I discovered is that though it might have been possible to recover, it was certainly easier and ultimately less stressful to just reinstall and restore from backup. A
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