recovering files IMPORTANT

[robak]

Hi

first: shame on me because i used partition magic to resize my partition; and now i have a disaster!

so, here is how all this startet:

i have windows 98 running on a seperate hd for gaming but i needed more storage space.
so, i decided to small down one linux partition to get 10G free space.
i startet partition magic (this was the mistake) and all went without problems. i had 10G free space but the problem was that i already had 4 primary partitions. the last thing i had to do was converting the 4th partition from primary to an extented one. i thought that this wouldn't take so long because its just an entry in the partition table. But partition magic startet again to move 40G of data. DAMN. again 6 hours of waiting. but finally windows crashed and there was no other way to end it, i had to reboot. now i have the following problem:

the partition type is something special of partition-magic-type and i had no access to my data. i deletet (now under linux ) the partition and made a new one exactly with the same blocks the old partition ( the one with that partition-magic-type) had. i can see now some of my old data but most of them are lost. and some directories are now simply files with a size of e.g. 3.5Gigabyte ! or some directories i had before are now one text-file or a symbolic link. another problem is that du -s gave me a total size of 800 Terabyte !!

my question is now: is there a tool for linux that searches files and directories and restores them? i didn't change any files on that partition only deletet 7 files which i could not access.

i need help PLEASE


thanks in advance
greez robak

P.S: for everyone out there: NEVER USE PARTITION MAGIC

[Dolda2000]

That's quite a problem. The only tool there is for filesystem recovery would be fsck. If this is ext3, then it is fsck.ext3. I wouldn't bet you can find much, though...

And indeed, I almost think there should be a big banner on this site saying "Don't use Partition Magic". In all my experience, Partition Magic has caused nothing but trouble.

[robak]

as far as i know fsck only checks if there are some changes which were not protokolled. so fsck.ext3 wouldn't find much because i think that partition magic doesn't care about journaling on a filesystem.

but isn't there a possibility to work with a hexeditor?

[Dolda2000]

Nah, fsck does a lot of sanity checks all over the filesystem and tries to repair things it finds that are faulty.

As for a hex editor, no, sorry, that's too much work for any human. Trying to repair an avaragely sized filesystem would take weeks, months or years. In that case, the debugfs program is probably a better idea.

[robak]

i have run fsck.ext3 and some files could be restored.
thank the guys who invented the ext-filesystems and fsck !!!