Re: Need help salvaging what I can from major disaster

[Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com>]

I realize that my last e-mail included too little information.  Sorry
about that.  Here are some more relevant details.

It turns out that I backed up the hard disk (HD) to the external drive
(XD) twice.  The first backup went well, as far as I can tell.  I
spot-checked individual files, etc.  Everything looked normal.

This first backup would have sufficed, but after I had done it I came
across the recommendation that a disk of that size (2TB) should be
formatted for ext4, whereas I had originally formatted it for ext2.  I
reformatted the disk for ext4 (fdisk + mkfs.ext4), and then repeated
the backup.  This backup procedure was in the form of a shell script,
that I had tested repeatedly.  I just re-ran it.  My memory is fuzzy
on the subsequent details.  Since everything had gone so well up to
that point, I probably did not check everything as obsessively as I
had up to that point, but something must have gone very wrong.

At any rate, at the moment, my only hopes are that

  1. something may be recoverable from the first backup in XD;
  2. something may be recoverable from HD.

The second of these is (I think) less likely, because I changed the
partition scheme for HD, going from a single partition, to separate
partitions for /, /var, /tmp, and swap.  In contrast, XD has always
consisted of a single partition.

Now I'm looking for some data recovery tool (preferably from Debian)
that either is part of some bootable media, or that I can use from a
USB stick after first booting from a Debian Live CD.

Any recommendations for these would be appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!

kj