Secondary DRIVE ERASED!!!

[john]

One of the servers I maintain at ServerBeach went down for scheduled maintenance on Saturday and when it came back up the second drive was not found (not mounted).

I'm not yet entirely sure what happened, but was told that a mkfs was issued (not necessarily by ServerBeach-- so I'm NOT blaming anyone) which they say erased the partition table and all of the data on the drive.

This drive contained/contains several gigs of data, and there will be a much smaller headache if I can recover it!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might be able to recover the files here?

[john]

/sbin/fsck -t ext3 /dev/hdc

yields:

fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
e2fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
/dev/hdc: clean, 11/10059776 files, 323881/20104560 blocks

[knightfoo]

If you know what the partition table looked like before (hopefully you remember what you did to create the partition!) you can sometimes recreate the partition table and filesystem structure in order to access the data. The partition table has to be exactly where it was before, and when you create the filesystem with mke2fs you need to use the "-S" flag along with any block/inode size flags you used before. If you just used defaults for mke2fs the first time you created the filesystem, just run "mke2fs -S /dev/hdXX".

Keep in mind that by doing this you probably eliminate any chance of data recovery getting data off the drive, and it is NOT guaranteed to work at all. ServerBeach and myself are not responsible for any loss of data or data recovery costs that may result from hardware failure or attempted recovery attempts.

-knightfoo

[compmind]

Try reading this how to

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition-Rescue/

If the data on the hard disk is very important you can try using Stellar phoenix software is expensive but its well worth it.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/

The only downside to it is that is must me run in windows.