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ext4 broken by fsck -y; recovery of structure possible?

Posted: 29 May 2018, 16:42
by allquantor
Hi there,

I have a 5TB USB3 drive, which recently came up with some FS trouble. The drive is new so I didn't think of it much, and ran fsck -y on it to get it back to work again. Only now the drive shows up containing nothing. The Gnome Disk-Manager still shows the drive as 64% full which would be about right. Testdisk doesn't show any files or folders. Photorec is able to recover files. (I didn't let it run all the way, because I need to buy another drive first.)

My questions are:

-Is there any chance to recover the filesystem structure. Maybe letting the testdisk "deeper search" run all the way through? (The docu doesn't say much about this.) This would take days and if it is hopeless anyway I'd rather spend the time on sorting the photorec output.

- Are there maybe any specialized ext4 tools (other than fsck) which I could try?

- Is photorec able to recover large files on an unfragmented disk? (As I said the drive is new, most parts of it have probably been written to exactly once. So I'd expect no fragmentation.)

Thank You very much in advance!
allquantor

Re: ext4 broken by fsck -y; recovery of structure possible?

Posted: 31 May 2018, 05:57
by cgrenier
Check if your files are in the lost+found directory. If they are missing, try again a fsck.
If the problem remains, use PhotoRec but it will not recover the original filestructure.

Re: ext4 broken by fsck -y; recovery of structure possible?

Posted: 07 Jun 2018, 19:25
by allquantor
Hi,

after letting fsck run for a good while the (hidden) folder lost+found appeared and contained everything I was looking for. I was a bit afraid at first that fsck could make things even worse. But after reading up a lot about it and reading your post I just tried it.

Thank you very much for helping. Also thank you very much for testdisk and photorec! Those are awesome tools.

Allquantor