[ale] Again with the filesystem recovery SOLUTION?

[Geoffrey]

ChangingLINKS.com wrote:
> I may have found an easier way (by accident). 
> 
> As a follow-up:
> The other day, I was installing Red 8.0 on a Maxtor drive, and the 
> circumstances cost me loss of data on a slave drive. After all of our 
> discussions about ext3, I brought up the topic and the "local ALE" meeting 
> here in Austin last week. One guy mentioned that he had done the data 
> recovery for ext3. Moreover, he said that ext3 gives a false sense of 
> security because the journal can "go bad" and make it difficult to get the 
> data back without losing the data. He said that ext3 is NOT a good 
> journalling filesystem, and that his computers run on something called 
> "xfs(?)" He went on to repeat that ext3 just has journaling and if you don't 
> NEED that, it is probably better to stick with ext2.

Not that I'm a fan of ext3, but you take this as an expert's opinion?

> 
> With that lesson, and my own experiences - I have declared ext3 "worthless."  
> Until they get a better undelete AND I learn to backup the journal, I will 
> only be using ext2 filesystems - which solves my undelete problem.
> <Drew spits in the direction of ext3>

Sounds reasonable based on your experiences.

> 
> THE SOLUTION:
> The installation process somehow caused the slave drive to be corrupted. I 
> believe it may have been due to me specifying a different name for it, and 
> indicating that it was ext2.

It seems to me you're trying to blame corruption of the drive on the 
process.  Was this a mistake?  It wasn't the process that corrupted the 
drive.  The process did what yo told it to do.

Point being, if there was data on that drive which you wanted to 
protect, you should have been more careful.  If it was a different drive 
altogether you could have disconnected it from the ide cable prior to 
the install.

> When I booted the computer with the original drive (not the Maxtor), the 
> installation hung until I . . .
> 
> went through a normal fsck /dev/hdc and said "y" to everything.

Again, you run these processes quite carelessly.  fsck is not a tool to 
use in this manner.

> 
> When I logged in, the filesystem would not automatically mount with fstab.
> I mounted manually, and did not specify file type.
> I saw many of my files in "lost+found" directory on the drive.
> 
> ||: To get the drive to mount with fstab, I had to change the filesystem 
> specification to ext2!! I do not believe that the filesystem was reformated - 
> but :||

All of this information should have been readily available if it was 
done during the install.  The install clearly tells you when it is 
formatting a partition.

> 
> Anyway, I was able to recover much of the data (using "Worker" to help with 
> the tedious process of renaming files).
> 
> So apparently there is a way to convert the ext3 back to ext2 (either by 
> renaming the filesystem and claiming that it is ext2 - which I believe was my 
> "mistake") or by reformatting ext2 and recovering the data from there!

I'm going to do a bit of testing on this.  Someone else posted that you 
can mount an ext3 as ext2 and all you loose is journalling.  This sounds 
too simple. I would have thought that if you could do this, you could 
just as simply recover the files.

Drew,

Please, don't take this wrong, I'm really trying to be constructive here.

Based on your posting, it appears to me that you are quite careless 
during your install process and administration of your systems. 
Identifying a partition during a new install incorrectly and running 
fsck on a file system as you mentioned earlier is just careless.  You 
blame a lot of your problems on the systems, yet it seems to me you 
don't take the proper precautions.  I would think you would be in much 
better shape if you proceed a bit more cautiously in the future.

-- 
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net

The latest, most widespread virus?  Microsoft end user agreement.
Think about it...

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