Very Computer

by **Anish Mehr** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

Hi all,

Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing the
command
mkfs -c /dev/hdb

It screwed up the whole file systems, which was NOT backed up all. I not
only lost all the data, but surely my job too.

Is there any way for me to recover from this disaster? The OS used on the
system is RedHat Linux 6.0.
Please help me in NOT loosing my job this way?
Thanks much for your time and help.
May god bless you.

Anish.

by **Vilmos Sot** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

> Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing the
> command
> mkfs -c /dev/hdb

> It screwed up the whole file systems, which was NOT backed up all. I not
> only lost all the data, but surely my job too.

> Is there any way for me to recover from this disaster? The OS used on the
> system is RedHat Linux 6.0.

I am afraid you are in serious trouble. What you can do is to try to
salvage text from the disk. Try "strings /dev/hdb" and let's hope you can
salvage some of the contents of the text files.

Vilmos

by **Artur Swietanowsk** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

> > Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing
> > the command
> > mkfs -c /dev/hdb

> I am afraid you are in serious trouble. What you can do is to try
> to salvage text from the disk. Try "strings /dev/hdb" and let's
> hope you can salvage some of the contents of the text files.

Sad as this case is, I still would be interested to hear if anything
at all was left on the disk. The '-c' option checks the device for
bad blocks, so I'd expect it to overwrite the whole disk surface
with some test patterns before making a filesystem.

Regards,
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Artur Swietanowski http://www.bigfoot.com/~swietanowski
Institut fr Statistik, Operations Research und Computerverfahren,
Universit?t Wien, Universit?tsstr. 5, A-1010 Wien, Austria
tel. +43 (1) 427 738 620 fax +43 (1) 427 738 629
---------------------------------------------------------------------

by **Vilmos Sot** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

> > > Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing
> > > the command
> > > mkfs -c /dev/hdb

> > I am afraid you are in serious trouble. What you can do is to try
> > to salvage text from the disk. Try "strings /dev/hdb" and let's
> > hope you can salvage some of the contents of the text files.

> Sad as this case is, I still would be interested to hear if anything
> at all was left on the disk. The '-c' option checks the device for
> bad blocks, so I'd expect it to overwrite the whole disk surface
> with some test patterns before making a filesystem.

I just created a 10 MB file, made a filesystem on it, mounted, and copied
some text to it. Next, I unmounted the filesystem image, made a
"mkfs -c filename", and I still could see the text strings in the file.

the -c switch makes for me only a read-only test.

mke2fs 1.14, 9-Jan-1999 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
a is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
[snip]
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done

So, there is still some chance to recover some text fragments from the
screwed disk although I have to acknowledge it is horrible at best.
If you (the one who suffered this accident) have a bigger disk (and
enough free space on it) copy the disk's content into a file on the bigger
drive (dd if=/dev/hdb of=/path/to/huge/space) and try to open it
in a suitable text editor and throw out the unneded stuff. *NEVER* ever
work on the original (formatted) disk but always on a copy. In this
way, there are some chances you can get some things recovered, but it
will be mostly text files. You can try to do this method over and over
and try to salvage a lot of pieces of data. Again, *DO NOT WORK ON THE
ORIGINAL DISK*.

Vilmos

by **Juergen Hein** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

>> > > Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing
>> > > the command
>> > > mkfs -c /dev/hdb

>> > I am afraid you are in serious trouble. What you can do is to try
>> > to salvage text from the disk. Try "strings /dev/hdb" and let's
>> > hope you can salvage some of the contents of the text files.

>> Sad as this case is, I still would be interested to hear if anything
>> at all was left on the disk. The '-c' option checks the device for
>> bad blocks, so I'd expect it to overwrite the whole disk surface
>> with some test patterns before making a filesystem.

>I just created a 10 MB file, made a filesystem on it, mounted, and copied
>some text to it. Next, I unmounted the filesystem image, made a
>"mkfs -c filename", and I still could see the text strings in the file.

Yes, that is one way --

Quote:
>the -c switch makes for me only a read-only test.

-- the other is to type man mke2fs where we this is to be found --

-c Check the device for bad blocks before creating the file system,
using a fast read-only test.

-- 8))

[...]

Quote:>So, there is still some chance to recover some text fragments from the
>screwed disk although I have to acknowledge it is horrible at best.

[...]
As all relevant information is gone -- forget it. To recover some text
is a far cry from recovering the whole partition -- "He who does not make
backups and he who does not make sure they can be read back shall be
in deep trouble one day".

Ta-ta,
Juergen

--
\ Real name : Jrgen Heinzl \ no flames /

by **Sandy Bryso** » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00

I have little faith in restoring your info as it appears you just
reformatted your HDD, but I would suggest the RedHat Support Group if you
need to get a Quick Answer, I wish you the Best of Luck....and hope you take
this as a learning lesson....BACK UP YOUR DATA!, this is for Evrybody, take
this gentlemans mistake as a Lesson and Dont let it happen to You......

>Hi all,

>Yesterday night, I made my life miserable by accidentally issuing the
>command
>mkfs -c /dev/hdb

>It screwed up the whole file systems, which was NOT backed up all. I not
>only lost all the data, but surely my job too.

>Is there any way for me to recover from this disaster? The OS used on the
>system is RedHat Linux 6.0.
>Please help me in NOT loosing my job this way?
>Thanks much for your time and help.
>May god bless you.

>Anish.

Very Computer

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!

Any recovery from "mkfs -c /dev/hdb" command -- Pls help!!!