From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: Recover files from a broken ext3 partition Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 09:59:20 -0500 Message-ID: <20131216145920.GA6991@thunk.org> References: <52AF1253.1000608@public.noschinski.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Lars Noschinski Return-path: Received: from imap.thunk.org ([74.207.234.97]:40631 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753920Ab3LPO7Y (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 Dec 2013 09:59:24 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <52AF1253.1000608@public.noschinski.de> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 03:46:43PM +0100, Lars Noschinski wrote: > I have got a hard disk which was damaged by a fall and would like to > recover a few files from that. (There is a backup for most of the > data, but a handful of recent files are missing. These are important > enough to spend some time on them, but not for paying a professional > data recovery service). > > Using GNU ddrescue I was able to read 99.8% of an ext3(or 4?) > partition, so there's hope the data is still there. Unfortunately, > some key parts of the file system seem to be damaged, so e2fsck fails: > > - ------------------------------ > % ddrescuelog -l- -b4096 sdd5.ddrescue.log > badblocks.sdd5.4096 > % e2fsck -b 20480000 -v -f -L badblocks.sdd5.4096 sdd5 > [...] > Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes > Block 1 in the primary group descriptors is on the bad block list > > If the block is really bad, the filesystem can not be fixed. > You can remove this block from the bad block list and hope > that the block is really OK. But there are no guarantees. > - ------------------------------ > [at 20480000 there seems to be an intact superblock; got the number > (and the block size) from 'mke2fs -n'] What I'd suggest doing is making a complete copy of the disk using ddrescue to a known good disk, and then run e2fsck on that. It's going to be simplest, most foolproof way to recover the data. Yes it will take a while, but you can let it run overnight... - Ted