On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Dan Hatton wrote:
> I take all this to mean that my data are still on the disc, but the > directory structure has been corrupted; any ideas on how I can restore it > without having to resort to my (6 week old) backup of /dev/hda1, please? OK, a brief answer to my own question, which hopefully will sit in the archives and be some use to someone: Norton Disk Editor made a remarkably good job of getting back many files which have lost part or all of their directory entries, and their FAT entries, although using it's a rather time-consuming job, and it wouldn't work for files of more than one cluster which were arranged over non-consecutive clusters (because without the FAT, I could find no way of detecting to which bits of the disc files were jumping.) A word on why the accident happened in the first instance: Linux sees one more cylinder on my hard drive than Windows does, and the partition Scandisk was supposed to be nuking included the `phantom' last cylinder. I'm guessing that Scandisk, reaching the end of the cylinders it could see, `wrapped around' to the first cylinder of the drive, which was in another partition and had useful things on it like my Windows FAT and root directory, and destroyed them. Does this guess sound reasonable to anyone? Dan
