Arch Linux

Sekre

Member

From: The Rainy North

Registered: 2006-11-24

Posts: 116

ext3 lost all files ?

G'day folks,

I have encountered a slight problem with my external drive today.
Due to what I think was a short power-failure yesterday my external
drive got uncleanly umounted and therefore died somewhat,

so I made sure it was unmounted (reboot) and ran fsck.ex3 on it
and it asked me alot of questions about inodes, didn't understand
squat so I pushed default (enter)

And now the drive is empty, or rather all files and folders are gone
and my lost+found are populated with the same filesize as before
so it appears nothing is deleted only lost.

So here to the question, how can I recover the files?
Tried to rerun fsck.ext3 but it didn't do anything..
Kinda new on these kind of errors  :oops:

Much thanks for any help with this!

EDIT:
After checking the files in the lost+found folder they
all appear to be working correctly, which makes me even more
confused, for information more than anything else why would
fsck move them there if they are working?

And since they are all working should I just restore it manually?

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: ext3 lost all files ?

After checking the files in the lost+found folder they
all appear to be working correctly, which makes me even more
confused, for information more than anything else why would
fsck move them there if they are working?

The i-nodes of the journalized file system were broken. Basically the pointers to the files were lost. I don't understand much more than that.

I had a similar situation the other day and ended up losing a bunch of data. Most of my graphic image files were saved (both stills and movies), but I lost all of my word processing files as well as PDFs. In some cases, the directory structure ended up in lost+found, but the folders were empty upon re-examination. I ended up backing up all the few files that weren't already backup up, and rebuilt my system from scratch. Hopefully you save your data frequently.

Sekre

Member

From: The Rainy North

Registered: 2006-11-24

Posts: 116

Re: ext3 lost all files ?

The i-nodes of the journalized file system were broken. Basically the pointers to the files were lost. I don't understand much more than that.

I had a similar situation the other day and ended up losing a bunch of data. Most of my graphic image files were saved (both stills and movies), but I lost all of my word processing files as well as PDFs. In some cases, the directory structure ended up in lost+found, but the folders were empty upon re-examination. I ended up backing up all the few files that weren't already backup up, and rebuilt my system from scratch. Hopefully you save your data frequently.

aah thanks, I think I understand it abit more more now.

And I must say I share your pain
Only some weeks ago my laptop 'fried' its internal drive (macbook bug)
And I lost a lot of important files...that just sucks really
This time around I got lucky though, it may be a lot of work to get the
files back to their original state but at least they are mostly there.