Well, it really is too late now, as this was my root partition and I
couldn't unmount it immediately even if I had known what to do. I had
already looked at Midnight commander but your additions were helpful as I
only saw the information about undeleting from the command line. The
information wasn't life-or-death and I learned a lot in the process. As
for backups, I'm really sorry but i can't figure out what a MO disk is.
Unfortunately, the only facilities I have right now for doing backup of
any kind is the old floppy, and I probably should have had this data on
floppy. I'd love to have a backup system, and you'll get no argument from
me against its importance, but the reality is that I don't have one right
now.
This incident also points out the wisdom in having your linux system
mounted on several partitions so that in cases like this you can unmount
the partition immediately.
As for the trash can, it wouldn't do any good if your hard disk breaks but
could be an asset in momentarily slips of the fingers (or the brain) such
as I had.
If anybody does try this with the ext3fs, I would be very interested in a
post re: the results.
thanks to everybody for their suggestions; I also discovered the
undeletion howto and the recovery program due to a combination of my own
searching and people's comments.
By the way, I learned before i ever started linux that panic is the surest
way to complicate an already bad situation, so that was never an issue.
--
Cheryl
