[TriLUG] Oops.. Super User Error :-)

[Paul D. Boyle]

Brian Henning wrote:
>   In a moment of extreme brain-farting, I just royally fscked up my /
> partition (literally--ran fsck with no arguments on a mounted filesystem).

[...]

> So obviously I've done a Very Bad Thing (TM).  Is there any way to Save My
> Butt (TM) or am I resigned to reformatting and reinstalling, and just losing
> the little bit of not-backed-up data that was there?  Again, it's not a
> production machine yet, so it's really just an avoid-the-royal-PITA factor,
> but nonetheless, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Others probably have more experience and better ideas in dealing with this, but
I'll throw my 0.02 in anyway,

First thing I would do would be to pull the harddrive out and put it into
another (working) Linux box, so you can at least look at the drive in a 
bootable machine.

If you were using an ext2/ext3 filesystem, there are a couple of
HOWTO's which deal with undeleting files from a ext2 filesystem.
Given your particular problem, these may or may not help.  In addition,
the HOWTO's are fairly old, but still they may give you some ideas.
Here are the URL's:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Ext2fs-Undeletion.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Ext2fs-Undeletion-Dir-Struct/index.html

Good Luck,
Paul

-- 
Paul D. Boyle			    |	boyle at laue.chem.ncsu.edu
Director, X-ray Structural Facility |	phone: (919) 515-7362
Department of Chemistry - Box 8204  |	FAX:   (919) 515-8909
North Carolina State University     |	http://www.xray.ncsu.edu  
Raleigh, NC, 27695-8204