On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Brian McCullough <bdmc@bdmcc-us.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 11:34:45AM -0700, Ken Bass wrote:

> Most of them (that I am interested in)were either image files (jpg, png,
> bmp), ISO images (DVD, CD), music files (mp3, flac, etc), and a few MS
> executables. Is there a utiliity that can help restore these files, maybe
> scan the lost+found files for these types?

Not a lot of help, probably, but the "file" command should at least give you some idea of what type of files they are.

Actually seems to be more help than I thought possible. I ran it (recursively) through all of the files in the lost+found and the output sent to a file. Looking through it, I first found several ISO files, and since they all had labels as part of the structure, I could just move and rename them.

Next I found a whole lot of audio type files, tagged with ID3. But that was all of the information "file" could give. Is there a utility to read ID3 tags and generate a file name from it? I seem to remember I had many GBs of mp3's, flac's, ape's, etc., and that would be a real tedious pain to try to recognize and rename all of them :-(.

The same goes for MS applications (.exe). "file" did recognize them as such, but, like the audio files, it didn't give enough information to tell what they were.

So at least this debacle was not a complete unrecoverable catastrophe :-). Thanks to everyone who helped.

FWIW: I got some helpful information from this page at Novell's site: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/appnote/19386.html . But if you look at the last step, it does say that if the first PV is trashed, you will be in the same position as I was. Maybe someone should put together a wiki page with that and the procedure I just went through? Just a wishful thought.

Thanks again,

ken