Quoting Martin Bishop ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Hi David, > > Thanks for replying. > > David Wright [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I don't have the start of this thread anymore. You have linux on > > this machine? If so, I'd try and mount the partition readonly from > > linux rather than going anywhere near it with other OSes. I don't > > think linux looks at the partition type, but only the magic. > > Yes I have linux on this machine (I'm dual booting Linux/Win98). > Hmm, if linux doesn't care about the partition type, then does it > care about the <file system> type?
Yes. If you think about it, only a dumb boot program requires partition types and the bootable flag. A smart one will be able to boot from the partition it's told to, but this requires it to remember, or to have some sort of user interface built in. But you can't recover files as files without knowing the system by which the bytes are laid out in the partition. Ext2 filesystems take this seriously and pepper the partition with backup copies of the superblock. FAT doesn't. > I'm asking this because hda2 was FAT32 (I accidentally deleted it > and created a new partition on top as EXT2, same size, same > partition type. And now I'm in panic mode and I'm trying to recover > any data on hda2. That's basically the start of this threat.). If it was a FAT partition, you will never mount it as ext2. A serious data recovery person would, I imagine, dd the data off the disk and then look for obvious structures like the top-level directory which is in a fixed address after the FATs and the superblock (or whatever the equivalent's name is). They might have to reconstruct this block to make the filesystem mountable. I guess you're not going to go that far, so you'll probably just try mounting it is as all possible varieties of FAT. dd'ing might get you a few large textfiles off a next-to-virgin disk that has little fragmentation. > > If you can mount it as whatever filesystem type works, then you can > > copy out the data. If you can't, I can only guess that another OS has > > vomited over part of it. > > Which <file system> do you suggest? EXT2? And is there a chance that > this will further corrupt the data on it? Just FATs. Mount it readonly and you won't be able to corrupt it. (That's why I suggested a recovery person would copy it first.) Cheers, -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.
