[Linux] Journal.

System hanged today, it’s happening more often lately, possibly due to
too many interfaces talking at the same time.

Sadly /dev/hda2 (vfat) got corrupted, suffered great data loss.
Notes truncated, entire recently created directory tree disappeared.

Steps took to recover:

1. boot into init 1 (before it mounts hda2)
2. run fsck /dev/hda2 - found errors, suggest to truncate file, told
   it not to.
3. remove /dev/hda2 from fstab, reboot.
4. try to copy whatever’s left of the file on working partition.
   (don’t write to it!)
5. more /dev/hda2, and try to search for lost segments of file
   manually. (takes forever). ‘more’ cannot go page up so need to use
   xterm buffer to go up.
6. salvage what I can…
7. run fsck again in init 1 but didn’t want to correct the data…
   strange.
8. ran scan disk in windows, there’s two options, automatically
   correct file system error and scan for bad blocks. I did both, it
   didn’t give any warning or messages in the process and when it
   finished, the files that were corrupted was gone. The consolation is
   that it left a directory called found.000 where I suspect keeps all the
   files it removed from the filesystem. I was able to grep and get back
   some some files from there.

Later I heard from Chris there’re programs under windows that recovers
file for you. I guess I’ll try that next time.

Will not keep important data in vfat unless absolutely
have to. Will setup version control and commit changes every day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2004 at 10:39 am and is filed under System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.