Cannot recover ext4 /home partition
Posted: 07 Sep 2012, 19:15
Disaster...I got Dell D800 laptop with dead display and no OS and I tried to install on it something that would work with external monitor. The only linux distro that worked out of box was Parted Magic and then I decided to try Salix (I tried it already in VirtualBox and I like the distro). However I couldn't manage the "blind" install and I decided to install Salix on my work desktop and write down all the installation steps to use then only keyboard while installing on the laptop. My work system has 2 sata HDDs 500Gb each. The motheboard has also 1 IDE channel and I put there 80Gb HDD from the laptop. In BIOS this IDE disk became 1st and I started installation. Right away I noticed that I have a choice of 3 disks without any disk sizes: just sda, sdb, sdc so I couldn't recognize which drive is what. I went back to bios and disabled 2 SATA channels ...just in case. At the booting menu I then noticed that I only have 1 hdd (80Gb) and cdrom. Fine, I started installation with piece in mind ... to find out that I installed Salix on my main HDD!
Well now I'm trying to recover my main HDD. It was partitioned like this:
1PP - experimental partition, last was Win8 (whipped), ntfs;
2PP - FreeBSD, ufs2;
3EP - extended with swap, Ubuntu,ext4 and empty LP,ext2, 160GB;
4PP - storage fat32, 100GB,full
It looks like this now:
1PP Linux /boot
2PP Linux swap
3PP Linux (Salix)
The deep scan results:
I couldn't find any presence of FreeBSD, pitty but it's not really big loss: almost no documents were there.
My main OS was Ubuntu (lots of documents) and it looks like TestDisk successfully recovered the ext4 however I could save everything except /home partition (where the documents obviously resided).
I don't remember I played with encryption but if open /home it shows:
and when I enter the <user_name> directory I can only see this:
Copying gives just empty /home/<user_name> directories, I cannot even read the misterious README.txt.
Theoretically I can redo all the documents lost but with an exception of my kids' pictures...obviously.
Just got a thought: Salix is not very large and it resides now somewhere at the beginning of HDD where empty partition of ~30GB was located. Maybe it's possible to delete it and somehow restore then entire HDD to it's conditions before the accident?
Please help.
Well now I'm trying to recover my main HDD. It was partitioned like this:
1PP - experimental partition, last was Win8 (whipped), ntfs;
2PP - FreeBSD, ufs2;
3EP - extended with swap, Ubuntu,ext4 and empty LP,ext2, 160GB;
4PP - storage fat32, 100GB,full
It looks like this now:
1PP Linux /boot
2PP Linux swap
3PP Linux (Salix)
The deep scan results:
TestDisk successfully recovered fat32 storage partition so I lost almost nothing in storage (it's a magic btw!)Disk /dev/sda - 500 GB / 465 GiB - CHS 60802 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
* Linux 0 1 1 764 254 57 12289656
P Linux Swap 765 0 1 892 254 47 2056304
D Linux 893 0 1 60800 254 59 962422016
D Linux 1848 1 1 5763 250 62 62910224 [Foreskin]
D Linux Swap 9138 1 1 10181 254 42 16771776
D Linux 10182 1 1 29762 254 57 314568696
D Linux 26239 1 1 32112 254 60 94365744
D Linux 29142 0 1 35015 253 60 94365744
D Linux 29763 1 1 42816 254 56 209712440
D Linux 34970 162 9 40714 161 7 92277296 [/]
D Linux 34971 37 11 40715 36 9 92277296 [/]
D Linux 34974 19 54 40718 18 52 92277296 [/]
D Linux 34982 190 25 40726 189 23 92277296 [/]
D Linux 38248 1 1 42294 202 59 65011712 [LV4]
D FAT12 39718 0 7 39718 45 51 2880 [NO NAME]
D Linux 40635 12 18 46248 11 11 90172776
D Linux 40637 87 27 46250 86 20 90172776
D Linux 42295 1 1 46210 254 58 62910472 [LV5]
D Linux 42817 1 1 47746 254 60 79200384
D Linux 42817 8 8 47746 227 33 79198208
D Linux 46211 1 1 47746 254 62 24675776 [LV6]
D FAT32 LBA 47747 0 1 60800 254 63 209712510 [storage]
I couldn't find any presence of FreeBSD, pitty but it's not really big loss: almost no documents were there.
My main OS was Ubuntu (lots of documents) and it looks like TestDisk successfully recovered the ext4 however I could save everything except /home partition (where the documents obviously resided).
I don't remember I played with encryption but if open /home it shows:
Code: Select all
drwxr-xr-x 0 0 4096 30-Apr-2010 16:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 0 0 4096 14-Aug-2012 09:48 ..
dr-x------ 1000 1000 4096 30-Apr-2010 15:22 <user_name>
drwxr-xr-x 0 0 4096 30-Apr-2010 15:18 .ecryptfs
lrwxrwxrwx 0 0 44 30-Apr-2010 16:13 .directory
Code: Select all
dr-x------ 1000 1000 4096 30-Apr-2010 15:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 0 0 4096 30-Apr-2010 16:13 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1000 1000 31 30-Apr-2010 15:18 .ecryptfs
lrwxrwxrwx 1000 1000 30 30-Apr-2010 15:18 .Private
lrwxrwxrwx 1000 1000 52 30-Apr-2010 15:18 README.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1000 1000 56 30-Apr-2010 15:18 Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop
drwx------ 1000 1000 4096 30-Apr-2010 15:22 .cache
Theoretically I can redo all the documents lost but with an exception of my kids' pictures...obviously.
Just got a thought: Salix is not very large and it resides now somewhere at the beginning of HDD where empty partition of ~30GB was located. Maybe it's possible to delete it and somehow restore then entire HDD to it's conditions before the accident?
Please help.