[plug] Recovering INODES

[Nick Bannon]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 05:20:01PM +0800, Earnshaw, Mike wrote:
[...]
> Mounted the drive and ....nothing!. All my data is lost! Well maybe not

Ouch. In a nutshell, you're fucked.

Anything you _can_ recover is a bonus.

> as there are lots of #num files in the lost+found directory. In my
> limited knowledge I assume these are inode files.

Those _are_ your files - you've lost all information about their names,
but if you're lucky, you've still got them intact.

First - mount it read-only and take a copy of the contents. If you can
avoid it, don't work on that drive until you're sure you have everything
you want off it.

ls -lS will sort by size, "file *" will tell you what type of files
they are, and that's about all you have to go on. Sort them into
directories and try to find what you're looking for, then give them
good names. "strings" and "less -S" are handy for scanning through
binary files looking for recognisable things. "grep -l" will simply
print the names of files which contain a given string.

	mkdir executables
	mv `file *|grep ELF |cut -d: -f1` executables/

will move all the ELF executables into a directory together, you'll
have to do similar things for the rest.

[...]
> Many, many thanks in advance. Some home brew bottles up for grabs for
> the assist ;P

You might be needing those. <grin>

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal