Topic: how to recover data on a ext3 hard disk

[John]

I have a sme box running 5.6..I installed 4 other hard drives after installing sme to a small hard drive..I'm using the sme box for a file server all was working great for the last month then i added a user to the sme box did a bind mount to a hard drive in here home folder.Then all of sudden i lost all data on the hard disk.The drive geometry is correct so the drive didn't fail i can create a test folder on the drive just fine..How can i recover the data that was on there??? I tried running acronis data recovery that is suppose to support ext3 partitions well it tells me the partition is unknown..tried this command "e2fsck -cc -C -f -v /dev/hdb1" if found the lost and found folder but that's it..There is atleast 30 gigs of data on this drive that i need back

[Tom Keiser]

You don't say what disk controller(s) you were using to run 5 hard drives or how they were connected.

Next, if this was the 5th hdd, it seems unlikely to be "hdb1" as you state in your e2fsck command.

I wonder why you just don't install a couple of large ide or scsi drives in a raid array, rather than single drives on different mount points. Everything would be much easier, simpler, and safer.  

More info from you might enable one of us to help you.

Tom

[John]

okay sorry for the lake of info..
there r 5 hard drives all together..
sme box has no floppy or cdrom.
hda1 and hdb1 onboard ide controller 1
hdc1 and hdd1 onboard ide controller 2
hde1 on a promise pci/ata/100 controller card
hda=3.4 gig hard drive
hdb,hdd, and hde are 60 gig hard drives
hdc is a 160 gig hard drive

i added this in the etc/fstab file "/home/e-smith/files/users/john/home/hde1 /home/e-smith/files/users/pam/home none bind"
  did a mount -a
went to access the drive from her computer got a access denied..but all the folders were there
issued a chmod 777 for her home directory
went to check to c if it worked and everything was gone.

The hard drive in question was originally hde1 on the promise controller card  
swapped it with hdb to rule out the promise card causing the error.

installed a cdrom to run acronis recovery expert well it's suppose to support ext3 but it tells me all the hard drives have a unknown format.
So i removed the hard drive in question and installed it in my windows machine and attempted to run the recovery expert from there well it won't attempt to do anything cause it doesn't c a deleted partition..I'm not about to delete the partition then attempt to recovery untill i tried everything else first

[Michael Smith]

have you tried booting it with a Knoppix CD?

[Norrie]

Install the drive in a windoze box and run this...

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml

It's a free linux data recovery system.  I have both the registered win32 version and free (unrestricted) Linux version (which you run on win32) and it works extremely well.  I was able to recover data from a trashed RH8 server that someone had tried to rebuild by re-installing and had made things worse.

Hope this helps
NTB
8o)

[John]

Thanks i gave it a try.....It sees all the folders put when i attempt to recover the data it says recovered 237896 files well when i look in the folder where the files were recovered to there is nothing there just alot of $Inode2345's files with no size

[NTBlade]

Hi,
I'm no expert at using this program but as far as I recall there's an "extended scan" option I think.  try that.  Otherwise I'm sorry.  I can't help any more
N