Re: Recovering from MKFS

[Volkan YAZICI <yazicivo@ttmail.com>]

On Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:59:22 -0400, Ethan Rosenberg writes:
> I ran mkfs -L on an external usb drive, hoping to change it's name, which it
> did.  It, of course, rewrote the inode tables, which I did not realize that it
> would, and I cannot find my files on the disk.  Is there any way to recover the
> files?

Steps I would follow goes here:

1. Create a copy of the entire USB disk image. Don't play unnecessarily
   with the original hardware and remember that every mount operation
   will potentially decrease your recovery chance. (Since mount's are
   not totally read-only.)

   root# dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/root/sdb1.img.org
   root# cp /root/sdb1.img.org /root/sdb1.img

2. Grab TestDisk[1] and start playing with the copied disk image.

I had a similar problem to yours and TestDisk worked flawlessly.


Best.

[1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk