Subject: Re: I just mkfs'd my backup!!
To: Ryan M. McConahy <rm@m-net.arbornet.org>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
List: port-i386
Date: 05/27/2002 18:34:06
On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 11:47:48AM -0400, Ryan M. McConahy wrote:
> Ok. I had a 20gig hd, and had a 1.5g partition at the end, and
> had it in the disklabel nice. Then after repeated torture by
> the NetBSD install program (it didn't like my new partitioning idea),
> I forgot to include the partition, and made /home on top of it.
> The backup was all my personal data, my old Linux setup, 300mb of sources
> I'd collected over my 28.8kb modem, the NetBSD binaries, the NetBSD source,
> and generally my life. :( I'd also managed to get a gzipped version of
> the tar file somewhere else, which I also overwrote intentionally.
> 
> Is there any hope of me ever seeing my beloved data again *sob*?

If you didn't newfs the partition, but just did a partition which overwrote
this one then it's possible that some data are recoverable.
If you know the original size/offset, recreate a partition and see what fsck
can say about it.
If you don't remember it, try the small program I posted 2 days ago:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2002/05/25/0008.html

it will locate superblocks, and may help you finding the offset of the
partition.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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