Undelete or recover from badblocks on disks

[Roland Smith]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 05:37:34PM -0700, jaymax wrote:
> 
> I seemed to have lost some critical dump files during a restore. The
> directory in which they were backed up in seemed to vaporize. The data was
> present as indicated by df -h but the directory was not listed.
> fsck on the disk was ineffective
> fsck_ffs produced an extensive listing of bad block, a final SALVAGE option,
> but on completion, the disk "capacity" from the df -h was significantly
> reduced. 
> 
> Is there anyway of recovering even 'partial' data from these lost blocks?
> The drive has been disconnected so that there would be no 'write'
> activities?

Check the disk with  smartctl(8) from the sysutils/smartmontools port to check
that this isn't a hardware malfunction. If it is a hardware malfunction, the
disk is dying and should be replaced ASAP.

If the hardware is OK, try fls from sysutils/sleuthkit. As long as the data
isn't overwritten, it should still be there.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20090918/d794325b/attachment.pgp